Awake in the Dream World

Book excerpt: Otherworldly, provocative, and strange, Audrey Niffeneggerâe(tm)s art is a vital a part of her vision as her bestselling novels The Time Travelerâe(tm)s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry. Awake in the Dream World is a mid-career retrospective of Nifffeneggerâe(tm)s work, reflecting her talent for cultivating a captivating narrative exclusively through pictures and her own confrontations with life, mortality, and magic. Niffenegger's fantastical body of work is reminiscent of renowned pen and ink predecessors such as Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Egon Schiele, Edward Dulac, and Horst Janssen, but with a brutally honest and unapologetically strange female perspective that touches upon the universal trials of life - death and decay, love, jealousy, redemption, and the inevitability of change. Her works on paper, lithographs, and aquatints reflect the often surreal narratives of her artist's books. Through self-portraiture, Niffenegger reveals her own self-assurance and whimsy alongside anxiety and loneliness, probing darker corners of the human heart and mind, often exploring the hopeless struggle with what Shakespeare called 'this bloody tyrant, Time'. Essays by Audrey Niffenegger, National Museum of Women in the Arts Curator of Book Arts Krystyna Wasserman, and Art Institute of Chicago Curator and School of the Art Institute Professor Mark Pascale explore the artist's influences and work. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts