Michael Laundry: Oedipus Water Dream

“About 3-years-ago, I became crippled by a rare rheumatological disease. It was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me. It stopped me from sculpting. But, I started sculpting in VR and researching hydrotherapy. I had to take pain killers to sleep through the night. Then I got into the habit of waking myself up before they had run their course, and sculpting in VR between five and six am attempting to find dream-forms that related to my research on water”

• Michael Laundry

Oedipus Water Dream is a sculptural installation by Michael Laundry exploring the material relationship between water, dreams and psychoanalysis. The exhibition is the outcome of two and half years of working with water and VR as solutions to being disabled by Bekhterev’s disease (ankylosing spondylitis). Most of the works in the exhibition are the result of what the artist describes as a “crip dream routine”. Like Leonora Carrington’s surrealist practice, the subconscious is in dialogue with what Gaston Bachelard calls the “material imagination” or that which is rooted in substance, particularly water.

Laundry focuses primarily on stiacciato (low) and alto (high) reliefs. The sculptures are executed in a diverse range of materials: glass, wood, resin, sandstone, marble, and mezzatint. They have an apotropaic function important to Laundry’s eco-critical position on safeguarding water. Most of the sculptures in the exhibition float.

The artist considers two texts as departure points for an exploration of water, dreaming, and creation: Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams (1942). Deleuze and Guattari argue traditional psychoanalysis - with its focus on the Oedipus complex - is essentially repressive. For Bachelard, water as an element in the “material imagination” is important to creative acts like poetry and painting. He suggests that by engaging the materiality of water artists might gain insights that a purely formal adoption of images based on fleeting shapes and emotions could not produce. Laundry’s exhibition at LLLLLL artist run space adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s critical position that the Freudian model has been used by society to control “flows” of desire, forcing it into an essentially repressive and heteronormative subjective structure rather than allowing it to be productive and socially queer. Oedipus Water Dream affirms both artistic and non-artistic practices that are generative rather than repressive.

The exhibition is part of laundry’s 8-year interdisciplinary research project “A History of Swimming” in the Blue Humanities interrogating urban waterscapes. In this iteration, the artist focuses on water imaginaries in Aspern - one of Europe’s largest urban development projects. Part of the project looks at Vienna’s fast-growing 22nd district in the north-east of the city from a hydro-feminist position to imagine what a “high feel-good factor” (Wien 3420 AG) means for a vibrant material future where private enterprise meets the public demand for water recreation.

This is Laundry’s first major solo exhibition in Austria after establishing his practice at the intersection of visual arts, performance and the Blue Humanities. Laundry’s earlier hydrological research-based works have been selected by the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research’s “Effects of Climate Change on the World’s Ocean” ECCW (2023) conference, organized in collaboration with UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanic Commission’s “Ocean Decade”. His research on public waterscapes has been presented at 10th EASLCE European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment Symposium, Sea More Blue: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Blue Ecopoetics in Perpignan, France (2024).

BIO
Michael Laundry (NO/CA) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and curator. His work examines urban waterscapes as a departure point to interrogate the confluence of: water, men and money - or, hydrological precarity, masculinity in crisis and neoliberalisation. Laundry choreographs immersive sculptural installations populated with literary characters, philosophers and family members. Laundry works primarily with stone, glass, and wood. Laundry holds an MA in Fine Art from the University of Gothenburg (Valand), and an MA in Comparative Literature from the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies from the University of Bergen.

Laundry has been shown in Bangkok, Berlin, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen and Kristiansand by festivals and venues including: Bangkok Art and Culture Centre BACC, Neon Kunst Berlin, Galleri Palmera Bergen, Galleri Knipsu Bergen, KRAFT Bergen, Ravnedans Kristiansand, Alt_CPH Copenhagen, BOA Billedkunstnerne i Oslo og Akershus, and NSFW Gothenburg