Article: Magical thinking: conjuring lavish visual environments from the most ordinary materials, and drawing outlandish tales from true stories, Saskia Olde Wolbers makes videos of hypnotic beauty.(Critical essay)

Saskia Olde Wolbers's studio, in London, is small and not overly tidy. There are piles of papers and books, a slightly funky empty fish tank, remnants of various synthetic fabrics and trimmings, and nothing easily identified as useful for making art. Her videos, on the other hand, are marvels of perfection, seamlessly constructed worlds of falsehood and disorientation in which unseen protagonists traffic in assumed identities, faking everything from professional credentials to family status. Their tales are characterized by porous temporal and spatial boundaries, and by weak distinctions between waking life and dreaming, biology and technology, cause and effect. Most ...

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