Father Bear, 2024 is part of Æmen Ededéen’s (Joshua Hagler) ongoing artistic project titled the Glass Dream Game. Fusing references from every subject, ranging from art history to philosophy, religion, and science, fiction and poetry from the artist’s personal library, each work in the series is an enigmatic and layered reflection on the relations between human erudition, memory and lived experience. The title of the project references Hermann Hesse’s renowned novel The Glass Bead Game, in which the players exercise their in-depth scholarship to unearth elegant associations across the breadth of human knowledge. Begun in 2024, Ededéen’s Glass Dream Game follows a process that shifts between chance and deliberation, resulting in complex dream-like compositions. In each painting, the artist considers six images or texts from specific pages in his book library selected by means of an ancient divination practice I Ching.

Echoing the idea that a personal library can function as a kind of portrait and reveal much about one’s experience, the Glass Dream Game is both an exercise in self-reflection and in divining the connections between disparate disciplines and images. Ededéen, for whom both Hesse and I Ching arrive through a long-time fascination with Jungian thought and psychoanalysis, assumes the often uncanny synchronicities between texts to have deep significance. Thus, he understands himself and his library to be entangled in an ongoing collaboration through which the Unconscious reveals itself.

Reflecting the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the boundary between the rational and felt, ordinary and mysterious, the Glass Dream Game is a project in radical interdisciplinarity. Both personal and detached, the selection of six stimuli behind each painting unveils, for Ededéen, unexpected connections while embracing a form of encounter with the Unconscious.