Teresa Diehl

BE MY GUEST

El Nido, 2016
Installation, mixed media, fishing line with resin, projections, and sound track
Courtesy of the artist

El Nido is a video and sound installation of multiple floor-to-ceiling panels made from hand-crocheted monofilament line and lines coated with clear resin. Integrating the site’s architectural details, the translucent panels emanate from a central structure of the original bed canopy and follow the intricate latticework of the original ceiling. The panels create layers of protection for the viewer, at once like a nest—safe and embracing—and also akin to a dream-catcher that traps bad dreams in its web and allows only the good ones to glide through.
Four different video projections of birds in slow motion flight overlap onto the structure, much like a dream sequence: some clear and lucid, some soft and distant, repeating over and over—a visual mantra. In the words of Diehl, “There is no hidden meaning so that the mind isn’t focused on any particular quality or outcome. It is simply a means that helps achieve heightened levels of awareness or peace.” The music, composed by Diehl, works to intensify the meditative state induced by the shimmering lights of the videos.
“What is a bedroom but a physical space where we could feel safe to fly away…”

TERESA DIEHL: BREATHING WATERS, a NLE Solo project

Breathing Waters, 2015
Video and Sound Installation
Dimensions vary
Photo: Josh Simpson

Breathing Waters is an immersive video and sound installation that takes the historic site where two bodies of water merge—the Hudson and East Rivers—as a point of departure. Diehl’s poetic visualizations touch on leitmotifs of water, ranging from creation myths and ritual cleansing to the very cycles of life itself. The artist links water to womb time: submerged in fluid, we are disrupted by the trauma of birth from our ability to breathe in water. This association perhaps explains the universal yearning to return to the source of water, and as Ishmael says in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “Water and meditation are wedded forever.”

WHEN YOU CUT INTO THE PRESENT THE FUTURE LEAKS OUT

L-Aber-Into, 2015
Video and sound installation
20 x 30 feet

Teresa Diehl’s work combines installation, video, sound, sculpture, and photography to create strangely hallucinatory environments that produce, simultaneously, bodily comfort and discomfort. For her work for the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, Diehl creates a site-specific labyrinth that envelops the viewer with layered tracks of sound and superimposed light sources. These installations address and transform the emotional, which is increasingly filtered and anesthetized, questioning the terror of reality.
Photography by Whitney Browne and Josh Simpson.