In its world premiere at the Blaffer, the video installation Noctambules immerses the viewer in a dreamy cinematic encounter between the artist in slumber and her congregating sculptures. French for “night creatures,” this baroque fantasia imagines the actions and desires of artworks if they had the opportunity to reverse the course of art making and re/sculpt their maker. The setting of this seductive chiaroscuro is a swirling bed that also assumes sentient properties, changing colors to reflect shifting emotional states before enveloping its chimerical passengers. To further amplify this uncanny arena, Mesquita populates both the stop-motion video and the surrounding gallery with doppelgangers and surrogates – casting a lookalike to “play” her on screen, alongside fairytale animals and entities that move between the real and imagined. As the objects of the artist turn back upon their author in in this stirring Pygmalion allegory, we can’t be sure who’s dream we occupy, or whether their intent is intimacy or revenge. Questions of ownership and animation also gather within Noctambules as we mull the conundrum of who makes who, and how art lives when we close our eyes.
