Liliane Tomasko: 12 nights x dreams — Rockland Center for the Arts

12 Nights x Dreams is Liliane Tomasko’s first exhibition in Rockland County since moving her main working studio to Tappan NY in 2015, and will offer a rare glimpse into the philosophical reverie that underpins all of the artist’s work. 

This exhibition of new work sees Tomasko honing that concept still further, using a collection of folded and stacked hotel bedlinens. Each measuring 109 x 65 inch, the scale of a twin bed, the sheets are now unfolded and drawn on with bravura strokes of spray paint, then hung with their irregular and individual grids of folds still visibly present. Semi-transparent black is contrasted with carbon black, white against the off-white fabric, and blue, create a near monochrome nightscape.

Twelve bedsheets represent twelve nights. A night is defined as 12 hours. Twelve is a symbol of cosmic order, the number of space and time: there are 12 months in a year; 12 signs in both the Chinese and Western Zodiac; 12 tribes of Israel; and in Greek mythology there were 12 Olympian gods. The artist sleeps with her husband and child in the same bed each night, where two became three, with the addition of one. And each person dreams untold dreams each night, so from 12 the possibilities are myriad.

These dreams are made manifest in a series of multicolored drawings in which Tomasko extrapolates the plethora of possibilities that lie within the same lines of the timeworn sheets. Like jewels from a dream, the colors reveal a mindscape of oranges, pinks, reds, greens, yellows, and blues. Dynamic and brave, yet quietly luminous and reticent at the same time, the drawn marks demand recognition and then seemingly self-efface.