The Clear Water is Mirroring the Clear Sky (2024) marks a formative moment and the beginning of a new chapter in Æmen Ededéen’s artistic production. Portraying delicately intermingling contours of figures and shapes in a meditative dream-like realm, the painting is the very first work in the artistic project Ededéen refers to as the Glass Dream Game.

Following a process that combines chance and deliberation, the artist portrays improbable connections between found references, leaving behind rationalism in favour of visions and dreams. In each painting, Ededéen considers six images or texts from specific pages in his extensive personal library selected by means of an ancient divination practice called I Ching.

In Clear Water Mirroring the Clear Sky, images from such disparate sources as The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, catalogue of works by Paul Klee and a monograph of his wife the painter Maja Ruznic, metamorphose and overlap, evoking the glimmers of memories on the periphery of human consciousness. The title of the work is in fact a quote from Golding’s renowned novel which Ededéen discovered on a page suggested by I Ching. Applying pigment in layers and subsequently scraping it away, the artist’s process here mirrors the search for veiled meanings in the structure of the Glass Dream Game.

Reflecting the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the permeable threshold between the rational and felt, ordinary and transcendent, logic and intuition, the Glass Dream Game is a project in radical interdisciplinarity. Both personal and detached, foretelling and ordinary, the selection of six stimuli behind each painting unveils, for Ededéen, unexpected connections and the possibility of the collective unconscious.


Æmen Ededéen lived and worked in San Francisco and then Los Angeles for fifteen years before moving to Roswell, New Mexico in 2018 as a grant recipient of the year-long Roswell Artist in Residence Program. Ededéen was born at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho in 1979 and is a first-generation college graduate with a visual communications degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Self-directed research and travel has underpinned Ededéen’s career and is essential to how the artist integrates creative influences with his life experience.

2018 saw two museum shows at the Brand Library and Art Center in Los Angeles and the Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico entitled “The River Lethe” and “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded” respectively. 2021 marks two solo exhibitions for Ededéen with “Drawing in the Dark” at Cris Worley in Dallas and “The Living Circle Us” at Unit London, curated by David Anfam. He has exhibited paintings, sculpture, video, and animation in galleries and museums in North and South America, Europe, and Australia including a long list of solo exhibitions. Reviews and features about the work, as well as his own poems and essays, have appeared in a variety of publications and media outlets in the U.S. and other parts of the world.