WASHINGTON, DC.- von ammon is presenting Wake Me Up Inside, a solo exhibition by New York–based artist Catharine Czudej, whose work continues to chart the psychic topography of contemporary American life—a landscape where commerce, belief, and selfhood dissolve into one continuous, monetized stream.

If her previous exhibition God is Good examined the spiritual exhaustion wrought by a society ruled by connection and commerce, Wake Me Up Inside turns back toward the body—household labor, home economics, and the protean materials that surround them. In the aesthetic universe of her previous exhibition, transcendence occurred by way of QR codes and livestreams; this exhibition suggests that it can be accessed via the stuff of meatspace: molten waxes or metals, and experiments in mechanical kinetics. A sort of garage or basement alchemy makes room for spiritual experiences: transubstantiation not via wafer or wine but via pantry and toolshed staples.

At the center of the exhibition is a chandelier fitted with dozens of handmade lava lamps, constructed from pantry jars and a secret mixture of wax and liquid, and made molten by hot lightbulbs. For brief moments, the viscous ooze pulses and drifts like living matter, performing an unstable miracle of heat and suspension. These flickering reliquaries of home life turn household leftovers—salsa, jam, juice jars—into radiant vessels, small-scale embodiments of entropy and motion.

Nearby, bismuth wall works find their coruscating, crusted form via the cooling of molten metal. Bismuth, also found in Pepto-Bismol, hardens as it cools into prismatic, pixel-like structures—a digital construction formed naturally by primordial matter. Their iridescent surfaces suggest both earthy corrosion and ethereality, an alchemical moment when the physical behaves like the virtual.

A ball-polisher sculpture hums softly in the space, consisting of plastic buckets, soap, and small motors in continuous circular motion. This object, both functional and gnomic, evokes the hobbyist’s workshop — the garage as a temple of American ingenuity and quiet devotion. The sound of the device resonates an almost monastic vibration, a ritual of cleansing and repetition.

If God is Good pointed towards the divinity of commerce and code, Wake Me Up Inside is eucharistic, invoking the tactile and the mercurial. Czudej’s alchemy is neither nostalgic nor ironic; it is an act of resistance against the sanitizing influences of a culture drawn progressively into a collective virtual experience. By placing the mystical inside the corporeal, she offers some ballast for the human vessel, who, willing or not, must navigate the currents of dehumanizing technologies.

In this exhibition, the artist’s faith lies in process itself — in melting, cooling, and polishing as gestures of reverence. What Czudej offers is actually not transcendence, but rather re-entry: a return to the material world as the only place left where real miracles can still occur.