Æmen Ededéen (Joshua Hagler): from the Glass Dream Game
23rd April, 2025 – 24th May, 2025
Art Brussels 2025
MARUANI MERCIER
SOLO BOOTH 5C.03
Brussels Expo, Place de Belgique 1
1020 Brussels
At Art Brussels, Æmen Ededéen (Joshua Hagler) presents The Glass Dream Game—an intricate fusion of art, philosophy, and personal history that meditates on knowledge, memory, and the texture of lived experience.
In his solo booth and first presentation with the gallery, Æmen Ededéen (Joshua Hagler) stages an ongoing artistic project titled The Glass Dream Game. Fusing references from every subject—ranging from art history to philosophy, religion, science, fiction, and poetry from the artist’s personal library—each work in the series is an enigmatic and layered reflection on the relations between human erudition, memory, and lived experience.
Father Bear, 2024
mixed media with glass beads on canvas and
burlap
193 x 167.6 cm | 76 x 66 in
(AE/10)
Courtesy of the artist and MARUANI MERCIER
The title of the project references Hermann Hesse’s renowned novel The Glass Bead Game, in which players exercise their in-depth scholarship to unearth elegant associations across the breadth of human knowledge. Begun in 2024, Ededéen’s Glass Dream Game follows a process that shifts between chance and deliberation, resulting in complex, dream-like compositions. In each painting, the artist considers six images or texts from specific pages in his book library, selected by means of the ancient divination practice I Ching.
Echoing the idea that a personal library can function as a kind of portrait and reveal much about one’s experience, the Glass Dream Game is both an exercise in self-reflection and in divining the connections between disparate disciplines and images. Ededéen—whose encounters with both Hesse and I Ching stem from a long-standing fascination with Jungian thought and psychoanalysis—assumes the often uncanny synchronicities between texts to hold deep significance. Thus, he understands himself and his library to be entangled in an ongoing collaboration through which the Unconscious reveals itself.
In Clear Water Mirroring the Clear Sky, the first painting in the series, images from such distinct sources as The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Paul Klee’s notebooks, and a monograph on his wife and fellow painter Maja Ruznic metamorphose and overlap, evoking the glimmers of memories on the periphery of human consciousness. Applying pigment and materials—such as thousands of actual glass beads—in layers and subsequently scraping it away, the artist’s process here mirrors the search for veiled meanings within the structure of the Glass Dream Game.
The diptych titled The Academy of Forbidden Thoughts stages an improbable yet striking juxtaposition between a quotation from Philip Guston and image of a Tarot card. As the artist writes, “The first line of the lower Trigram given by chance was our Tarot book (which I never look at) showing the Six of Wands. Among the lines also was Philip Guston’s collected writings in which he discusses his painting Riding Around. Had I not landed on Guston, of all pages of all books, this painting would not have happened.” At once projecting humour and mystery, triumph and suppression, cultural divisions and thematic coherence, the painting assembles a multitude of visual layers to speak powerfully to the present moment.
The Clear Water is Mirroring the Clear Sky, 2024
mixed media with glass beads on canvas and
burlap 228.6 x 179 cm
90 x 70 1/2 in
(JH/3)
Courtesy of the artist and MARUANI MERCIER
At once projecting humour and mystery, triumph and suppression, cultural divisions and thematic coherence, the painting assembles a multitude of visual layers to speak powerfully to the present moment.
Reflecting the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the boundary between the rational and the felt, the ordinary and the mysterious, The Glass Dream Game is a project in radical interdisciplinarity. Both personal and detached, the selection of six stimuli behind each painting unveils, for Ededéen, unexpected connections while embracing a form of encounter with the Unconscious.
Æmen Ededéen (Joshua Hagler): Selections from the Glass Dream Game opens on the 23rd of April, 2025 until the 24th of May, 2025 at Art Brussels 2025, MARUANI MERCIER SOLO BOOTH 5C.03
©2025 MARUANI MERCIER
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