Artists

Graham Wiebe, Boz Deseo Garden

Press release

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.