curatorial statement, dreamscapes

by delia landers

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drawing from the tradition of popular education (a community-driven and collaboration-based form of political formation), i strove to create a project drawn from a plurality of ideas, to be guided by the process and develop the conceptual framework of the show through collaborative participation. i intentionally chose a theme that is mutable and undefined so that this framework was organically arising.

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i let go and followed the path of knowledge and experience that each artist and writer created. delving into the communal dreamscape that formed. this curatorial statement is drawn from a synthesis of the work of the eleven painters and eighteen poets in this exhibition.

 

dreams conjure literal and metaphorical pathways. both the actual realm of our subconscious and the expression of desire. the literal is the muddled and bizarre; scenes we inhabit in sleep, neither positive or necessary, dream and nightmare a dichotomy that alludes to the metaphorical. this metaphor of desire; a dream is something that we imagine or crave. it is an idealized future, utopic.

 

this project simultaneously deals with both of these definitions of dreams. the work shows a vast tapestry of temporality and physicality, displaying how dreams enable a breaking down of the bounds of reality, feeling both physical and ephemeral, the intangible space where our realities collide and expand.

 

these dreamscapes are spaces in which time collapses. memory and futurity are tangled together. some desire a return to the past, some envision a future, and some see a collapsing present. it is intriguing that these tangles are represented through the physical and subconscious alike. a melange of utopia and nightmare, creating these coinciding realities in which moments become untethered. this is abundantly clear in the real unconscious, whether collective or individual; there is an ability to traverse through a collapsed time and space to visit the dead and live entirely new histories and futures. though this appears in our waking lives as well: the draw of memory and the desire for a particular future.

 

physicality is central to these dreamscapes, though, when asleep or when delving into memory or futurity, intangible. but still touch, pleasure, and sensuality seem conceptually wrapped up with dreams. the memory of another's skin against ours or the desire to feel how our bodies interact with the land. almost all of the art is tied to these feelings of embodiment, the spaces we traverse or representations of our physical bodies.

 

dreamscapes are  touch

                                 memory

                                 desire

                                 history

                                 future