Carlin Wing's Ceilings Where I Sleep, 2005-2010 is a collection of 130 chronologically organized photos of interior and exterior spaces in which the artist has spent at least one night during the last five years. Shot in various formats, including analog, digital, and cell phone cameras, this ongoing archive documents the architectural details that frame the artist’s drifting into and awakening from sleep. With her gaze fixed upward on a changing canopy of textured walls, cheap veneers, patterned curtains, and banal lighting fixtures, Wing constructs a prosaic catalogue of intimacy whose affective kernel remains tantalizingly hidden.

Though the viewer is not privy to the emotional content that accompanies these transitory interludes, carefully maintained index cards supply just enough factual material to legitimate their truth status. Yet despite the existence of these apparently authentic photographic and administrative documents, Wing seems to be questioning both the empirical certainty of her narrative and its strategies of validation. Just like the uncanniness of a dream state, Ceilings Where I Sleep is a random and unverifiable sequence of events that is constantly being written and rewritten to discover meaning. And while the artist may ostensibly play the leading role in this drama, she also renounces exclusive authorship to become an empty placeholder that any viewer can potentially occupy. For all their self-evident visual information, Wing’s images operate like so many blank screens activated only when viewers projects their own fictions and desires onto them. Because certain scenes may gain or lose valence depending on particular readings, situations, or encounters, Ceilings Where I Sleep continually performs in the present tense.

With this disruption of visual confidence, Wing also addresses the history of photography and conceptual art. Her mapping of domestic topography resonates with the modernist archival impulse of Eugène Atget, among others, and its subsequent iterations in the typologically organized, serially structured photographs of artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher and Ed Ruscha. Unlike these precedents, Wing shifts her attention from public spaces and monuments toward architectural interiors and libidinal worlds and from a vertically positioned optical apparatus to a horizontally sited bodily matrix. Though she may use photography’s evidentiary language, Wing dissolves the objective lens through which 20th century documentary and conceptual practices have tried to capture and classify experience and replaces it with an unpredictable phantasmic organ.