Multiverse: Stories of This World and Beyond

Featuring Artists: Nicole Awai, Elizabeth Huey, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Susanne Kühn, Malcolm Morley, Robyn O’Neil, Lisa Sanditz

This exhibition brings together works from the Kemper Museum’s Permanent Collection that represent dream-like worlds cloaked in mystery. The artists make the familiar seem unfamiliar by distorting space and suffusing their fantastical scenes with characters seemingly caught between this world and another.

Multiverse: Stories of This World and Beyond presents a range of psychological landscapes populated with uncanny subjects. In her monumentally scaled drawing Masses and masses rove a darkened pool; never is there laughter on this ship of fools (2007), Robyn O’Neil situates the viewer within a vast ocean setting occupied by several rafts, each containing tiny figures that create hundreds of imagined micro-scenes. Elizabeth Huey’s The Visions of Charles Bonnet (2007) and Lisa Sanditz’s SubTropolis (2006) likewise blur the line between fantasy and reality by including segments of recognizable landscapes or habitats filled with objects and characters extracted from dreams. Seen together, the works in Multiverse convey the versatility of artists’ negotiations between real and imagined worlds.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website