Travel to another dimension has long held our fascination. From Alice’s tentative leap down the rabbit hole, Wade Davis’ experients with the worlds psychotropic flora, or teleporting from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, exploration of alternate realities expands our collective imaginations and in turn, provides a new framework through which to view the one we currently inhabit.

The work Structure for Formal and Material Imagination presents an opportunity to imagine an altering of reality. The distorted reflections of the surrounding environment seem to melt and shift at the surface of the curved walls; the structure appears to grow as the surroundings become compressed and shrink in relation to the viewer. Upon closer inspection, holes in the curved wall are revealed, portals floating in “non-space”. As one peers through a hole, the illusion of a vast space opens, as the sky is seen reflected in all directions, a dissolving of materiality. In the highly reflective convex basin at the bottom, images meld into the reflections playing along the interior sides; the sky is visible above and mirrored below, transforming the interior of the structure into a shifting container of the infinite - a useful space for the potential of traveling to another dimension.

In his book Water and Dreams, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard drew a distinction between the formal and material imagination, both of which were to be found in nature as well as the mind. The formal imagination in nature creates all the unnecessary beauty it contains, while in the mind it is fond of novelty and unexpectedness in events. The material imagination in nature aims at producing that which is primitive and eternal, and in the mind is attracted to elements of permanency. I believe all of these considerations can be found to exist in the work Structure for Formal and Material Imagination.