Beyond Dusk: Sylvie Ringer’s Explorations on the Threshold between Waking and Dreaming, Darkness and Light by Belinda Grace Gardner

The French idiom, “entre chien et loup” (between dog and wolf), gives metaphorical expression to the hazy twilight realm between dusk and darkness, when daytime certainties become blurred, and solid entities are reduced to sketchy silhouettes. In the blue hour, before the day has completed its passage into the night, hitherto familiar phenomena are rendered alien. At this time, a dog may turn out to be a wolf; a friend may be a foe; and a garden may reveal itself as a wilderness. On the fluid threshold between day and night, waking and dreaming, the delineated spaces of everyday life and the boundless, mythical expanses of the natural world, the German-Canadian artist Sylvie Ringer embarks upon her journeys into the unknown. In her figurative drawings and delicate paintings that fluctuate between inside and outside perspectives, realistic depictions and emotive evocations, she explores the hidden, subconscious, spiritual dimensions behind the shadows, appearances, and narrations.

Regarding “landscapes as stakeholders of emotion,”(1) a particular focus of the artist lies on historical concepts of utopia and paradise, including the notion of paradise as an enclosure or hortus conclusus: again, a kind of threshold phenomenon between order and chaos. This interest first brought the artist from the north German harbor city of Hamburg, where she completed her studies in fine arts and illustration, to Monte Verità in Ticino, the famed site of a former utopian colony. As Swiss curator Harald Szeemann pointed out in 1985, “The Mount […] still maintains its almost magic power of attraction. […] it is as if the mount preserves, hidden away out of sight, the sum of all the successful and unsuccessful attempts to breach the gap between the ‘I’ and ‘we’, and the striving towards an ideal creative society, thus making the Monte Verità a special scenic and climatic micro-paradise.”(2)

Sylvie Ringer continued her aesthetic research with a project about the short-lived Edenic Sonnenorden established in 1902 by the German student August Engelhardt in Papua New Guinea: a cult dedicated to the worship of the sun and of coconuts, which Engelhardt deemed to be “the tropical transubstantiation of God’s very flesh.”(3) In 2015, the artist returned to her birth country, Canada, with a German DAAD grant in 2015, working for some time in Vancouver. Here she learned about Sointula (literally: place of the chord, i.e., place of harmony), a utopian community founded by Finnish settlers in the late 19th century on Malcolm Island, British Columbia. She spent a year in Sointula as a resident artist in 2017, where she proceeded with her investigation of paradisiacal utopias and the power of sites with historical or mystical significance. Malcolm Island is part of the traditional unceded territories of the Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw First Nations. The drawings and paintings in mixed media on paper and canvas that Ringer produced on site and subsequent to her stay in Sointula are subsumed under the title Crab, Rock, Stick, Loss. 

As was the case already in her earlier series, these works follow the fragmentary, associative, subjective logic of dreams and open-ended storytelling. Small formats depicting rocks, shells, and debris that she found in the woods and at the beach, recall scientific surveys, mapping the given landscape in a compilation of its scattered components, while simultaneously subverting the notion of objective categorization through the intimacy and personal gestural expressivity intrinsic to the medium of drawing and to Ringer’s specific approach as an artist. Assembled in puzzle-like arrangements that leave blank spaces to be filled by viewer, the microcosmic visual elements appear like clues leading up to mysterious natural settings where pathways disappear into the darkness of trees and dense undergrowth. Seaside and forest scenarios are partially inhabited by anthropomorphic animals and ghostly creatures that allude to site-specific tales revolving around figures such as the trickster deity Mink or seals that symbolize the synthesis between the underworld (ocean) and reality, between conscious and subconscious action. In her luminous twilight spheres, Sylvie Ringer invokes the dialectical interplay between everyday experience and dream time, nature and culture, the mundane and the mythical, while transcending the immaterial boundary, the gossamer veil, that separates the domains of night and day, dusk and dawn.

Belinda Grace Gardner

(1) Sylvie Ringer in a conversation with the author on June 6, 2018 in Hamburg.

(2) Harald Szeemann, Monte Verità: “The place where our minds can reach up to the heavens...,” April 1985, cf. the section: ‘History’, website of the Foundation Monte Verità: http://www.monteverita.org/en/29/history.aspx (June 12, 2018).

(3) Zoë Bernard, The Curious Case of August Engelhardt, Leader of a Coconut-Obsessed Cult, Atlas Obscura, Nov. 20, 2017: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/august-engelhardt-coconut-cult (June 20, 2018).