Little Alice

The concept behind Monika Sosnowska’s works is based on an idea to set a trap for her viewers. She blurs the lines of distinction between the work and the space, plays with perspective and visual illusions and disrupts the order of the arranged interiors. In doing so, she creates a strong impact on the audience as their perception begins to waver and they begin to lose confidence about what is actually going on. The artist makes use of architectural elements – precisely delineated forms and planes. But the material she really uses is space, which she treats more as a sculptor than an architect.

There is no space for intuition in Sosnowska’s extremely rational installations. Their sophisticated coldness, however, does not lead to a feeling of calm but of anxiety caused by the unexpectedness of space. The artist’s works are indeed a perverse version of architecture parlante – architecture which is equivalent to its purpose and which thus evokes appropriate feelings. The forms created by the artist are far from pragmatic. Their place in reality is somewhat uncertain and they cannot be classified in any simple terms.

Little Alice is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). The artist has built four rooms en suite, which follow the order of the literary fiction. Each successive room is smaller so that the viewer can feel like Alice as her size changes with each new experience in Wonderland. The walls of the rooms are covered with different patterns that loosely refer to Victorian England. The skilful use of colour evokes a dreamlike atmosphere, while the contrasting hues cause the illusion of afterimages. When walking from one room to the next, one feels as if they are falling into subsequent scenes of a dream.

The order of the artwork and the novel by Carroll both follow the absurd logic of dreams: the absence of cause and effect in a dream are reflected in the geometric lack of cohesion in the piece. Its scale diminishes drastically with each room, while the en suite arrangement of rooms is only seemingly infinite. The state of suspension felt by the viewer is possibly similar to what Alice felt upon waking up.

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