WITT FETTER
Fata Morgana

September 6th - October 15th

A fata morgana is a type of mirage that appears to distort objects that pass through a narrow band along the horizon. When light travels through a temperature inversion–cold and dense air trapped beneath warm air–objects appear stretched, condensed, doubled and inverted. I imagine that the paintings in this show are subject to the same atmospheric conditions that produce a mirage. These are images formed through inversion, distance, and optical effect. The double horizon lines at the top and bottom of the canvas form a corridor of illusion and transformation–a sculpture becomes a girl, a girl becomes a princess, a bed becomes a diving board, a parachute becomes a life ring.

The repetition of shape, color, and subject produces an aesthetic and conceptual moiré.  In mathematics, physics, and art, moiré is an interference pattern created by the misalignment between two superimposed and identical structures. When one framework is seen against another, a third zone of infinite possibility emerges. My interest in moiré lies in its scintillating optical effects and its metaphorical potential to understand the trans body as something that emerges from the misalignment of two dominant systems of gender. In physics, moiré is fundamental to proving that light is at once two things: a particle and a wave.  As a viewer circumnavigates the ancient Roman sculpture of Sleeping Hermaphroditus in the Louvre, two modes of legibility–the masculine and the feminine–are seen in superposition. 

A horizon line marks the limits of perception and also gestures towards the world that lies beyond it. The contorted form of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus points in both directions. She is at once bound by cold marble beneath the constant gaze of the spectator and floating above it in a boundless space of dreaming. My paintings depict the fluid surfaces that materialize out of rigid structures. In the friction between two systems–cold and hot air, orange and blue, masculine and feminine, sharpness and obscurity– a desire is sparked for shimmering optical aberrations. 

- Witt Fetter, September 2023