In Wonderland: The Optical Unconscious, Julie Wolfe once again taps into the optical unconscious to reveal something essential about perception. Through juxtaposing images, Wolfe causes patterns to emerge through free association, unleashing apophenia—the process by which humans make meaning out of incidental images—across her pages.

Wolfe works within her own archive of images, appropriating and reappropriating them in new configurations that inspire wonder and pose urgent questions. How do dissonant images relate to one another? How do we relate to them? What can we learn by looking askance, by interrogating the unknown, and by opening ourselves to the unconscious? In her archaeology of form, Wolfe asks us to consider the hidden visual systems at play, their „deep history,“ and their afterlives.

Throughout Wonderland, images are superimposed, dissolving difference into semblance and aligning even disparate elements into a total whole. Vellum prints offer a sort of membrane between the pages' images, blurring them together and putting them into iconographic discussion. Bridging the mundane and the exquisite, the strange and the familiar, and the dissonant and the resonant, Wolfe probes the psychic powers of human experience while making visible the secret life of forms.