In Heino Schmid’s new collection of work, “we’re all innocent when we dream”, this duality between asleep and awake, peace and tension and right and wrong comes to the surface.

“I always liked the phrase and I decided to call the show that before I decided on any of the work,” explains Schmid. “I thought the title would give me a door to kind of walk through.”

“When you think of the phrase, there’s a way of flipping it: When we’re awake, we could be guilty—that there’s a certain guilt to being awake,” he continues. “So there’s this great double quality to the text which I thought was interesting.”

Indeed, Schmid’s work approaches this duality through both image and text, probing beneath a seemingly placid surface. In the relatively cozy gallery space of Cube West, he hopes to present a variety of emotional landscapes for viewers to bring their own preoccupations.

On the walls sit large bodies of text that at times command, at times comfort, and at times defend. The ubiquitous phrase “The devil made me do it” is deconstructed and reconstructed again, bringing forth a mantra of self-absolvency. What was done is never stated—it is not really important, for this admission of guilt sets a tone here that is further explored in his visual work.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about text and the power of the way text can be almost visual and the disparity between the juxtaposition of words,” Schmid says.

“I want a visual duplicity in the way that you can scope out the exhibition and take it in as a whole but somehow make the work engaging enough for people to also go in and really participate on an individual level with the work.”

Source: Sonia Farmer, The Nassau Guardian
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