There is something surreal in Alika Cooper's Manholes. In the literal sense of the French word surreal: manholes put us in touch with the “over-real,” forming a passage to that strange otherness of a reality in excess of our conscious awareness. The strange underground passageways of the real beneath the surface would remain indiscernible to the ordinary attitude of perception and the self-certainty of consciousness; however, the work creates a gateway between the waking life of the self and the intuitive “over-real” disclosed by a poetic consciousness. The surreal manholes constitute an opening between the human subject and the abyss of sensuousness and feeling that exceeds our conscious awareness. And yet, one would have to free the concept from the tradition of Breton’s surrealism; the manholes do not inhabit the dreamlike unconscious state of a psychologically isolated human nature, rather, they are orifices attuned to the constraints of the environment. The intestinal serpentine coils conjure a surreal unconscious ecology in which the human is existentially enmeshed.

Courtesy of SITUATIONS