Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present A bouquet of senses, new work by Yifan Jiang. The exhibition opens on Wednesday, April 19th at our Dallas location at 150 Manufacturing Street, Dallas Design District, featuring Jiang’s imaginative paintings and an installation of her latest video animation. Jiang’s work finds the strange, uncanny and magical in the quotidian world.

 “A bouquet of senses contains my most personal works to date. Constructed by probing the inner walls of my psyche, it is a reflection as well as a confession. As my memories settle and move further away from the present, certain moments start to surface. These particular flashes of time stick not only to my brain but also to my eyes, ears, tongue, and palms. Multiple kinds of perceptions add up to form my sense of “having been there.” As the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it: “A difficult relation to conceive— since one eye, one hand, are capable of vision, of touch, and since what has to be comprehended is that these visions, these touches, these little subjectivities, these ‘consciousnesses of … ,’ could be assembled like flowers into a bouquet….” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible p.141). Tiny pieces of sensations, sounds, tastes, temperatures, and pulls of gravity clustered to form past versions of myself, reflecting past versions of the world. These body memories take me back to sitting in a tree with a lover on a balmy summer night (Midsummer). Talking to a friend for hours until I feel transparent (Late afternoon). Getting a haircut in a pond at the tip of northern Scotland (Haircut). Dancing after midnight at the foot of a castle (Edinburgh). Feeling the gravitational pull of the gigantic desert sky (Throw, Fall). At one point, these sensations were real and felt by the bones, yet as they slip into the past, these specific instances seem unlikely to have happened at all. The paintings are detailed records of a dozen ephemeral feelings captured before they migrate to a remote corner of my mind.

During my past year of living in the New Mexico desert, prolonged isolation got me to ask one question: “Who is the one listening when I am speaking to myself?” Who is the “I” that listens to the words spoken by the inner voice? Who owns the inner eye that delights in the pink elephants of daydreams? Do they share a name with the dreamer, or are they just strangers living in the same skull?