UW Art Museum Presents New Film Installation ‘Desert Dreamscape’

"Desert Dreamscape," a new film installation by accomplished photographer and filmmaker Farah Al Qasimi, will open to the public Saturday, Nov. 23, at the University of Wyoming Art Museum.

The film, commissioned by Hyundai Artlab at Hyundai Motor Co., is the first installation on view of the UW Art Museum's forthcoming group show "Sympoiesis: Co-Creating Sense of Place." The exhibition takes place in the museum's Wyoming Theater Gallery.

"Desert Dreamscape" -- on view through next November -- is funded through the generosity of the Susan Moldenhauer FUNd for Contemporary Art, the Patricia R. Guthrie Special Exhibitions Gallery Endowment, Genesis Alkali and By Western Hands.

Al Qasimi's "Desert Dreamscape" is an immersive film experience, inviting the viewer into a fantastical scene based on her childhood bedroom. Featuring soft lighting and ambient music composed and performed by the artist, "Desert Dreamscape" invites meditation on nostalgia, longing and the feeling of "home." Engaging the viewer's nostalgia, the artist encourages a shared experience of longing that reveals the fragility of sense of place.

With a run time of more than 10 hours, the film calls for slow engagement and close looking. The patient observer is rewarded with a subtle shift in lighting as the scene transitions from daytime into night and back again, simulating the passage of several days. Its relative stillness and calming soundtrack invoke the internet genre of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos meant to soothe the minds of the stressed.

About the Artist

Al Qasimi makes photographs, films and music. Often working with large-scale vinyl imagery and a multiplicity of photographic prints and screens, she is interested in the internet and its hierarchies of information and emotion.

She loves the complexity of storytelling and value-building in children's cartoons, and many of her video works include primary narrators who are anthropomorphized. Through a highly collaborative practice, she has worked with hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African land snails, exorcists and, most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator.

Her work is in the collections of MoMA New York, Tate Modern, Guggenheim New York and Abu Dhabi. Al Qasimi has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine; Delfina Foundation in London; and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

For more information about the UW Art Museum, call (307) 766-6622, visit the website at www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum, or follow the museum on Facebook and Instagram.

Located in the Centennial Complex at 2111 Willett Drive in Laramie, the museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday hours are extended to 7 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.