Title: DREAM (for the Imagined Landscape series)
Dates: October 27 - December 17, 2001
Location: Consolidated Works, Seattle
Artists: James Barsness (Athens, GA), Nan Curtis (Portland, OR), Henry Darger (previously of Chicago, IL), Peter Drake (New York), MK Guth (Portland, OR), Jacci den Hartog (Los Angeles), Malia Jensen (Portland, OR), Din Q. Le (Los Angeles), Mariko Mori (Japan/New York), Cynthia Pachikora (Portland, OR)
Curatorial Statement
Each night in our sleep and in the moments we free our waking minds, we experience moments of sheer fantasy and of deep-seated yearning. We move beyond the consciousness of our daily lives and into the imagined landscape of our subconscious. Art is the product of such dreaming, and artistic gesture not only renders a dream real, it can also unveil the fantasy that constitutes reality.
“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow stronger.” Eden Phillpotts
Fantastic creatures in dimensions similar to those Gulliver encountered on his travels are present in Malia Jensens’s Beaver Story and in James Barsness’ The Trash Heap. Jensen’s eight-foot beaver sculpture is constructed of layers of plywood cut and stacked according to CAT scans of a life-size model beaver. The animal is not a cartoon caricature, but rather an accurate oversized topographical map. Beaver Story and her shiny fiberglass foxes in Knotty Situation tackle sexual themes, the Northwest timber industry and humanity’s ongoing quest to control nature. On a single canvas Barsness constructs a world that teems with tiny inhabitants. In The Trash Heap a myriad of characters both comical and grotesque are inked in ballpoint pen over a rich collage of comic books, maps, stickers, old newspapers and, to complete a boyish fantasy, pictures of sexy women. Barsness’ work is complex in conception and composition, but visually reads like notebook doodles derived from the dream life of an adolescent boy. His work writhes with activity. Naughtiness abounds in a nightmare reminiscent of scenes from a Heironymous Bosch painting, but unlike Bosch, Barsness exudes joyousness free from authoritative restraints.
Henry Darger spent most of his adult life coming home after work to spend the evenings alone in his tiny Chicago apartment. He was able to escape his routine existence by creating another world. Darger authored the longest piece of continuous fiction ever written. The Realms of the Unreal, which is over 15,000 typewritten pages, tells the story of a group of little girls, the Vivian Sisters, who travel the universe encountering wild creatures and wars of incredible violence. To illustrate his epic tale he produced a series of double-sided watercolor and collage drawings on joined sheets of paper, some that span over ten feet. The narrative of each drawing is nonlinear. Within each composition events are staggered sporadically. The viewer’s eye darts from foreground to background as well as along the length of the drawing to grasp a sequence of the adventure. Darger kept his dream close to him, never sharing it with anyone, only setting it free on paper to be discovered after his death in 1972. Darger’s madness was given structure through an obsessive lifetime commitment and devotion to recording his waking fantasy.
“I had dreamed once (that) I came to a small wayside chapel…. On the floor in front of the altar facing me, sat a yogi – in lotus posture, in deep mediation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.” C.G. Jung
In Kumano, Mariko Mori’s 1998 video, the artist is the central character who journeys through a series of four different oneiric landscapes. The viewer follows the artist through an ancient forest, to a sacred temple and eventually to outer space. The video gives the impression that we are participating in the artists’ dream, and that it is perhaps a lucid dream in which she is in control of the flow of events on her path to enlightenment. At each location there is a profound sense of searching for personal definition and spiritual enrichment through ritual. Kumano’s pace is at times rapid and out of control, and at other moments the central character forces a slowdown in the narrative with deliberate, precise ceremonial behavior. Mori uses ritual as the touchstone to create her fantasy of the future.
“The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In architecture, as in all our other arts – indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole – ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.” Robert A.M. Stern, Pride of Place
The American dream is at the forefront of work by New York painter Peter Drake. His naked suburbanites seem to have found the ultimate lifestyle freedom can afford. They are fully possessed of their bodies and the suburban environment in which they conduct their activities. The act of celebrating ownership of body and property becomes highly comical as Drakes’ middle aged, sagging subjects play tennis in the open air and shoot slingshots in front of a typical Leave it to Beaver house completely and contentedly in the buff.
In M.K. Guth’s sculpture/video installation Sara, go down in the hole and get some potatoes… the sculptural environment is the ghost of dated American kitchen. On one of the kitchen walls a fuzzy projection of a life-size woman peeling potatoes shocks the sleepy setting to life. In an article in the New York Times entitled “Dream House” (April 1997) the author says that “to be an American is to aspire to a room of one’s own.” The character in the video declares the space as her own; the space traditionally relegated to the female sex. The refrigerator, sink, table and chairs that make up the room are still and silent, heavy in form, but transparent in appearance. Despite familiarity with the interior setting Sara’s presence makes it difficult for the viewer to feel at home.
“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.” Anais Nin, The Diaries of Anais Nin
Dinh Q. Le, a Vietnamese artist now living part-time in Los Angeles, has created a new body of work in which he weaves photojournalistic images with stills from Hollywood Vietnam movies. In one piece Le combines Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a napalmed girl with an image of Tom Cruise from the movie Born on the Fourth of July. The latter image assumes dominance but it’s the underlying image of the burned girl that catalyzed anti-Vietnam sentiment. In turn it fueled the desire for a rethinking of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The sentiment that Ut’s very real photograph sparked can be seen in the artifice of Oliver Stone’s movie, which focuses on the tragedy of Vietnam in the American context. Le presents a forceful play on memory and media and ultimately how they effect our view of reality; he presents a space where fantasy and reality merge to create a powerful and emotional mix.
Jacci Den Hartog’s polyurethane waterfalls are inspired by Chinese landscape paintings, but reek of the kitchy plastic displays in Chinese restaurants. The humor of the latter association is clearly outweighed by the anodyne seriousness Den Hartog’s work achieves. The graceful flow of the medium and careful choice of delicate, pale blues and greens gives the work dignity and an ethereal quality. Den Hartog offers a dream of an exotic distant land that is interpreted and juxtaposed through a Western aesthetic.
Cynthia Pachikara’s XYZ video installation depicts a never-ending road trip. It’s nighttime, raining, with nothing in front of the moving camera except lines on a highway. The highway is only seen in the shadow of a swinging pendulum. The dark tone of the piece suggests running from rather than to something, but there is a sense of excitement and anticipation of what lies ahead. It is within the nature of everyone to fall into the trap of believing that things could be better somewhere else. Escaping and looking forward to a new beginning. As the daughter if immigrants from India, Pachikara has a personal connection with the story of rebirth in a new land.
Vacations too are in the realm of fantasy, and tourist destinations are constructed to meet the visitors’ expectations. Nan Curtis’ new installation Archipelago Paradise Lost fabricates a vacation dream spot. Bits of metal on a series of tiny pedestals represent the string of islands, and glossy, surreal photos of the islands at dawn and at sunset line the walls. Viewers are encouraged to take a travel brochure outlining what experience awaits them on Archipelago Paradise Found. There is even a coupon for 11 dollars off a day trip package that boasts that the islands are “a place where dreams come true.”
Artists are dreamers by nature and artwork is the product of such dreaming. Dozens, if not hundreds, of different dream interpretation theories exist. But the one unifying notion that binds such varied opinions together is that dreams reveal ultimate truths and insight into the reason things happen as they do. Artists, therefore, are in the business of both questioning and revealing truths.
“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow stronger.” Eden Phillpotts
Fantastic creatures in dimensions similar to those Gulliver encountered on his travels are present in Malia Jensens’s Beaver Story and in James Barsness’ The Trash Heap. Jensen’s eight-foot beaver sculpture is constructed of layers of plywood cut and stacked according to CAT scans of a life-size model beaver. The animal is not a cartoon caricature, but rather an accurate oversized topographical map. Beaver Story and her shiny fiberglass foxes in Knotty Situation tackle sexual themes, the Northwest timber industry and humanity’s ongoing quest to control nature. On a single canvas Barsness constructs a world that teems with tiny inhabitants. In The Trash Heap a myriad of characters both comical and grotesque are inked in ballpoint pen over a rich collage of comic books, maps, stickers, old newspapers and, to complete a boyish fantasy, pictures of sexy women. Barsness’ work is complex in conception and composition, but visually reads like notebook doodles derived from the dream life of an adolescent boy. His work writhes with activity. Naughtiness abounds in a nightmare reminiscent of scenes from a Heironymous Bosch painting, but unlike Bosch, Barsness exudes joyousness free from authoritative restraints.
Henry Darger spent most of his adult life coming home after work to spend the evenings alone in his tiny Chicago apartment. He was able to escape his routine existence by creating another world. Darger authored the longest piece of continuous fiction ever written. The Realms of the Unreal, which is over 15,000 typewritten pages, tells the story of a group of little girls, the Vivian Sisters, who travel the universe encountering wild creatures and wars of incredible violence. To illustrate his epic tale he produced a series of double-sided watercolor and collage drawings on joined sheets of paper, some that span over ten feet. The narrative of each drawing is nonlinear. Within each composition events are staggered sporadically. The viewer’s eye darts from foreground to background as well as along the length of the drawing to grasp a sequence of the adventure. Darger kept his dream close to him, never sharing it with anyone, only setting it free on paper to be discovered after his death in 1972. Darger’s madness was given structure through an obsessive lifetime commitment and devotion to recording his waking fantasy.
“I had dreamed once (that) I came to a small wayside chapel…. On the floor in front of the altar facing me, sat a yogi – in lotus posture, in deep mediation. When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.” C.G. Jung
In Kumano, Mariko Mori’s 1998 video, the artist is the central character who journeys through a series of four different oneiric landscapes. The viewer follows the artist through an ancient forest, to a sacred temple and eventually to outer space. The video gives the impression that we are participating in the artists’ dream, and that it is perhaps a lucid dream in which she is in control of the flow of events on her path to enlightenment. At each location there is a profound sense of searching for personal definition and spiritual enrichment through ritual. Kumano’s pace is at times rapid and out of control, and at other moments the central character forces a slowdown in the narrative with deliberate, precise ceremonial behavior. Mori uses ritual as the touchstone to create her fantasy of the future.
“The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In architecture, as in all our other arts – indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole – ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.” Robert A.M. Stern, Pride of Place
The American dream is at the forefront of work by New York painter Peter Drake. His naked suburbanites seem to have found the ultimate lifestyle freedom can afford. They are fully possessed of their bodies and the suburban environment in which they conduct their activities. The act of celebrating ownership of body and property becomes highly comical as Drakes’ middle aged, sagging subjects play tennis in the open air and shoot slingshots in front of a typical Leave it to Beaver house completely and contentedly in the buff.
In M.K. Guth’s sculpture/video installation Sara, go down in the hole and get some potatoes… the sculptural environment is the ghost of dated American kitchen. On one of the kitchen walls a fuzzy projection of a life-size woman peeling potatoes shocks the sleepy setting to life. In an article in the New York Times entitled “Dream House” (April 1997) the author says that “to be an American is to aspire to a room of one’s own.” The character in the video declares the space as her own; the space traditionally relegated to the female sex. The refrigerator, sink, table and chairs that make up the room are still and silent, heavy in form, but transparent in appearance. Despite familiarity with the interior setting Sara’s presence makes it difficult for the viewer to feel at home.
“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.” Anais Nin, The Diaries of Anais Nin
Dinh Q. Le, a Vietnamese artist now living part-time in Los Angeles, has created a new body of work in which he weaves photojournalistic images with stills from Hollywood Vietnam movies. In one piece Le combines Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a napalmed girl with an image of Tom Cruise from the movie Born on the Fourth of July. The latter image assumes dominance but it’s the underlying image of the burned girl that catalyzed anti-Vietnam sentiment. In turn it fueled the desire for a rethinking of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The sentiment that Ut’s very real photograph sparked can be seen in the artifice of Oliver Stone’s movie, which focuses on the tragedy of Vietnam in the American context. Le presents a forceful play on memory and media and ultimately how they effect our view of reality; he presents a space where fantasy and reality merge to create a powerful and emotional mix.
Jacci Den Hartog’s polyurethane waterfalls are inspired by Chinese landscape paintings, but reek of the kitchy plastic displays in Chinese restaurants. The humor of the latter association is clearly outweighed by the anodyne seriousness Den Hartog’s work achieves. The graceful flow of the medium and careful choice of delicate, pale blues and greens gives the work dignity and an ethereal quality. Den Hartog offers a dream of an exotic distant land that is interpreted and juxtaposed through a Western aesthetic.
Cynthia Pachikara’s XYZ video installation depicts a never-ending road trip. It’s nighttime, raining, with nothing in front of the moving camera except lines on a highway. The highway is only seen in the shadow of a swinging pendulum. The dark tone of the piece suggests running from rather than to something, but there is a sense of excitement and anticipation of what lies ahead. It is within the nature of everyone to fall into the trap of believing that things could be better somewhere else. Escaping and looking forward to a new beginning. As the daughter if immigrants from India, Pachikara has a personal connection with the story of rebirth in a new land.
Vacations too are in the realm of fantasy, and tourist destinations are constructed to meet the visitors’ expectations. Nan Curtis’ new installation Archipelago Paradise Lost fabricates a vacation dream spot. Bits of metal on a series of tiny pedestals represent the string of islands, and glossy, surreal photos of the islands at dawn and at sunset line the walls. Viewers are encouraged to take a travel brochure outlining what experience awaits them on Archipelago Paradise Found. There is even a coupon for 11 dollars off a day trip package that boasts that the islands are “a place where dreams come true.”
Artists are dreamers by nature and artwork is the product of such dreaming. Dozens, if not hundreds, of different dream interpretation theories exist. But the one unifying notion that binds such varied opinions together is that dreams reveal ultimate truths and insight into the reason things happen as they do. Artists, therefore, are in the business of both questioning and revealing truths.
