The Moment Perception Begins to Slip

NEW YORK — GHOSTMACHINE Gallery is pleased to present The Moment Perception Begins to Slip, an exhibition of works by Brooke Johannesen, Graham Krenz and Bernd Oppl curated by Magdalena Dukiewicz. The exhibition is on view from October 9th – October 31st, 2026.

There is a moment when reality begins to feel slightly wrong. Not enough to become a dream, and not enough to become a nightmare, but enough to make us question what we are looking at. A body is recognizable, yet its proportions no longer make sense. An object behaves in a way it shouldn’t. Something familiar becomes absurd, grotesque, or strangely alive.

The works in this exhibition occupy an unstable space between reality and perception. They take recognizable forms and disrupt their logic, creating a world that feels simultaneously familiar and impossible. Bodies stretch, transform, mutate, and resist categorization. The ordinary becomes strange, sometimes humorous, sometimes unsettling, and often both at once. The grotesque does not necessarily frighten us. Sometimes it makes us laugh. Sometimes it makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes we cannot decide which response comes first.

The viewer is drawn into this uncertainty, navigating a world where the boundary between the external and the interior becomes porous. Perception begins to slip. What we see may be real, imagined, remembered, transformed, or simply impossible. There is no clear moment when reality breaks apart. It remains recognizable, but something has shifted. Reality has not disappeared, but it can no longer be trusted.

Graham Krenz draws on the darker traditions of animation as a formative visual language, particularly the way children’s imagery can carry horror, violence, humor, and moral or ideological messages at the same time. His work is interested in the idea of childhood as a period of early conditioning, when stories, images, and fantasies begin to shape our understanding of the world before we are fully conscious of it.

This tension between innocence and disturbance runs through his sculptures. The sculptures seem caught somewhere between toy, monument, relic, and imagined creature, occupying a space where humor and discomfort coexist. Childhood memories become mixed with family histories, personal grief, imagined events, and possible fantasies, making it difficult to distinguish what was experienced from what was invented. Krenz uses this instability to create forms that feel familiar and almost cartoonish, while carrying something darker underneath: loss, fear, death, disappointment, and the impossibility of returning to an uncomplicated version of childhood.

Brooks Johannesen’s drawings look at the body as something learned, performed, and continually reshaped. The figures evoke images associated with femininity and coming of age, but their bodies refuse to remain within the forms and roles they seem to represent. They stretch, lean, fold, and attach themselves to one another, becoming almost object-like in their physicality. The bright colors and childlike visual language initially suggest play and innocence, while the distorted proportions and ambiguous gestures introduce something more uncomfortable. Exaggerated female body parts introduce a distorted eroticism. The artist approaches familiar images of femininity from within, simultaneously recognizing and disrupting them. The scene can feel like a twisted memory of growing up, in which the expectations attached to the female body become exaggerated until they begin to lose their logic. Nothing is completely unfamiliar, but the relationships between bodies, gender, and behavior have shifted. The result sits somewhere between humor and unease, capturing the moment when a familiar image of the self begins to become strange and when the relationships between the figures acquire an underlying awkwardness.

In Bernd Oppl’s videos, there is rarely a dramatic transformation. Instead, something familiar remains familiar while its logic slowly stops working. He constructs miniature versions of anonymous spaces such as waiting rooms, corridors, and hotel rooms, places that are recognizable but cold, standardized, and without a distinct identity. Then he films these artificial worlds in a way that makes us temporarily forget that they are models. His practice explicitly plays with the relationship between illusion and reality, using models, cameras, and altered perspectives to question how we perceive space. Like the other artists in the exhibition, Oppl begins with images and environments that are immediately recognizable, only to subtly disrupt their logic. A black cloud slowly spreads through a room, a space suddenly freezes and becomes covered in ice, or an unknown liquid begins to flow through a corridor. These unexpected disruptions gradually undermine the order of the familiar environment, creating a sense of unease while also provoking curiosity. Drawing from cinematography, illusion, and perceptual tricks, Oppl plays with our trust in the image, making us question what we are actually seeing and where the boundary between reality, representation, and invention lies. His work explores how easily our perception can shift, creating spaces that feel suspended somewhere between a real place, a movie set, a memory, and a dream.