The Sphinx

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Notes on Psychogenic Fugue: Graham Wiebe and Boz Deseo Garden’s The Sphinx

The Art Newspaper: Parfum d’hier, Sphinx de Gizeh et chamanisme
émergent magazine

In Graham Wiebe and Boz Deseo Garden’s The Sphinx, a large plywood box approximates the dimensions of a (non-existent) antechamber beneath the right paw of the Great Sphinx. The box in the exhibition houses their collaborative film, also entitled The Sphinx (2025), and on its exterior wall floats Wiebe’s cut-up novel HOW TO WIN WHEN YOU DON’T CONTROL YOUR ONLY LIFE AND IT’S STARTING TO BE ALL YOU AUTOMATICALLY! THINK ABOUT & GROW IN SEARCH OF The secret Lessons in POWER THAT TRAP PEOPLE OVER TIME (2025) whose spliced self-help texts become the transcript of the film. This marks the first engagement of the interior of Wiebe’s book works.

The interior of the Sphinx’s antechamber was seen in a vision by “The Sleeping Prophet” Edgar Cayce, a white American clairvoyant. In Cayce’s vision, the antechamber houses the “Hall of Records”, precursor to the New Age movement’s Akashic Records (a mythological repository of every thought of every being). Prior to his death in 1945, Cayce famously announced that his soul would return in 1998 in the form of an African woman.

For The Sphinx (2025), Garden has been hired by a wealthy buyer in Big Sur, California as the courier to deliver a slave chain sold from the Facebook Marketplace of Roy Hoffman, continuing Garden and Hoffman’s working relationship which began in early 2024. The film’s narration is performed by Emily Bennet, the manager of the buyer’s collection. Her meditative reading is accompanied by a series of imbricating binaural beats that score the film. Multiple frequencies, meant to “relieve pain” or induce “out of body experiences”, crescendo upon the depiction of the chain’s future location in the buyer’s home.

The footage, a collection of peripheral landscapes moving towards a final, undocumented transaction, closes with a sunset (filmed from the private street behind the buyer’s home) whose full recession into the horizon marks the deadline for the chain’s delivery. The son of the collector, an aspiring go-go dancer and designated heir of the artifact, ends the film with a series of lethargic stretches in preparation for a later and unrecorded performance.

Adjacent Wiebe’s book floats the hardshell case used to transport the chain. Their lengths mirror each other, implying an interdependent relationship between the length of the chain, of the book, and of the film.

In the narrow space between the plywood’s East wall and the gallery’s large windows, a framed work consisting of two unfixed Cibachrome prints hangs. Til today, visitors could view only its profile but never see it in full. For the duration of their exposure, the sun washed over the images, slowly fading them. By the time the Spring Equinox arrives— today at 10:01 AM GMT (the halfway point of the show’s run)—no image will remain and the work will be moved to the office space of the gallery for the remainder of the exhibition. The dissolved image becomes an offering to the Sun (God) who, in Egypt, recedes into the horizon directly behind the body of the Great Sphinx.

There are dissonant alignments between historical ideas of wellness and historical fantasies of race required to give them form. A certain kind of mythical suffering surrounds a New Age sublime for which there is no redress, for which transcendence is not possible, and whose sunset does not indicate the possibilities of a new day but a lasting betterment that is always out of reach.

Graham Wiebe (b. 1994, Winnipeg) lives and works in Winnipeg. Recent solo exhibitions include Final Hot Desert, London (2024); Disneyland Paris, Perth (2023); Final Hot Desert, Great Basin Desert (2023); Jargon Projects, Chicago (2022); and Blinkers, Winnipeg (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Final Hot Desert (2024); FLAT$, Brussels (2024); Franz Kaka, Toronto (2024); Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2023); The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik (2022); Palazzo San Giuseppe, Polignano a Mare (2022); and afternoon projects, Vancouver (2022).

Boz Deseo Garden (b. 1997, Monterey) is an artist and theorist working between Los Angeles and Paris. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Timeshare, Los Angeles (2024); Petrine, Paris (2023); and Jargon Projects, Chicago (2022). Selected group exhibitions and workshops include Project Space, London (2025); Final Hot Desert, London (2024); Heidi, Berlin (2024); Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); and Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2022). They received their BFA from California Institute of the Arts and their MFA from University of California, Los Angeles.

Graham Wiebe & Boz Deseo Garden
Delivery container for a historical artifact, 2025
injected polypropylene case, foam interior
24.5 x 80 x 7.5 cm

Graham Wiebe
HOW TO WIN WHEN YOU DON’T CONTROL YOUR ONLY LIFE AND IT’S STARTING TO BE ALL YOU AUTOMATICALLY! THINK ABOUT & GROW IN SEARCH OF The secret Lessons in POWER THAT TRAP PEOPLE OVER TIME, 2025
spliced self-help books
72.6 x 10.7 cm

Graham Wiebe & Boz Deseo Garden
The Sphinx, 2025
single channel digital video file, projection, sound, plywood box  
film: 24:47 minutes, box: 2.9 x 2.5 x 4 m

Graham Wiebe & Boz Deseo Garden
10:01 (Sun Offering), 2025
unfixed Cibachrome prints in artist frame
40.64 x 50.8 cm