In Valeska Soares’ interdisciplinary artwork, the almost theatrical process by which private sensations and images expand continually outward into the space of public exchange suggests an all-encompassing fantasy in which we become swept up in each other’s dream lives, and our separate tactile and sensual relationships with the world begin to overlap. In the hands of a different artist this might seem like a confining prospect, but Soares has spent nearly her entire artistic career to date employing suggestion, nuance and ephemerality to conjur up complex and interconnected worlds, so her ability to wield the medium of video installation as subtly and suggestively as any other artist working today almost goes without saying, despite the fact that for her it is still a relatively new medium.

Soares’ Taipei project depends fundamentally on the physical disposition of the space where it is being presented. An elongated sequence of three similar rooms is separated by wall-scaled translucent projection screens, with the viewers’ entrance at the center of one wall of the middle room, so that when we first perceive the space, we are equidistant from each of the other two rooms. The action, which unfolds on both of the facing walls, consists of a woman sitting on a park bench, essentially minding her own business. Her bench, which happens to be identical to the three-dimensional bench in the room where we are standing, is the only reliably solid object in the piece, because as we watch a series of modest vignettes unfold, we are never quite sure that what transpires between her and the various actors who enter and leave the scene is actually occurring.

Valeska Soares uses a range of methods to call our perceptions into question, but in her most recent works she has also discovered a conceptual loophole for her longstanding interest in representations of passion and romance. Using a narrative structure that is endlessly self-repeating, with ghosts and flesh and blood persons intermingling, and both sides slipping in and out of the realm of the visible, Soares gives us a visually luscious Eden, a space for mutual coexistence that is equal parts dreamscape and an example of mind over matter. Strategically placing us at the center, she anchors us in a room, sooner or later, we begin to wonder if we are as spectral to one another as these characters appear, both to selves and to us.