What Price Dreams Deferred?
by Elisa Turner
“Dream(land)” is about pleasures found and lost.
It comes at a worrisome present when pleasures extolled by artists in this exhibit are at risk. A timely first-time curatorial project by Annie Wharton, a talented artist herself, it’s one deserving of the brave aesthetic sensibility she brings to “Dream(land)” at Jail Gallery in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. The artists in this show hail from places all over the map, including Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Korea, Iceland, Sweden, and Wales. They tackle a thoughtful range of media.
“Dream(land)” seems made for the moment in which, as a recent bumper sticker I saw in famously congested Miami traffic tersely said, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Here’s another bumper sticker moment of truth spotted in Miami: “At least the war on the middle-class is going well.”
Across the land there’s rising anxiety and anger over spilt blood and oil in the Middle East, over wrenching changes in the economy at home and in the climate around the world, not to mention a historic and increasingly vitriolic campaign for President of the United States. For many, it’s too easy to engage in rabid denial tactics.
How else to explain the absurd popularity of the aging television show “American Idol,” when its banal glitz blurs into one seemingly endless season after another?
Ours is an age battered incessantly by the go-go pace of globalization, by arrogant desires to micro-manage the genetic code of Mother Nature whether it’s found on farmlands or floodplains at risk of hurricanes like Katrina. All the while many of us are seduced by frenetic, mind-frazzling clicks of digital toys and tools. Blackberries nick away at the slow delights of pleasures, like giving yourself big chunks of time to become lost in big dreams or in beguiling imaginary worlds of books you can’t bear to put down.
How else to explain the way movie-going crowds are enthralled by stories spun by novelist J.R.R. Tolkien in his famous trilogy “The Lord of the Rings?”
The trilogy was first published in the 1950s, yet it’s clear we live in an era when Tolkien’s tales--exquisitely imagined stories of grand dreams and epic battles between good and evil--satisfy an intense hunger gnawing at these early years of the Internet-obsessed 21st Century. Yes, you can rent “The Lord of the Rings” movies on DVD, but for sure Tolkien tells us about long-ago tales we still value highly today.
How else to explain that on March 20, 2008 the New York Times reported that a first edition of Tolkien’s 1937 novel “The Hobbit”—his much-loved prelude to the Rings trilogy—sold at a London auction house for over $100,000, for a sum twice the price experts predicted?
Now more than ever we need art in a show like “Dream(land).”
With imaginative materials wielded by this versatile crop of contemporary artists, the art in this show promises a richly multifaceted map to a place called Dream(land). This is a place shaped by seductive colors and slow pleasures, by fearful dramas and persistent terrors. It’s a place that maps our contemporary crisis.
Some of the artists in this show have developed careers in which they delight in the delicious pleasures of pure color, a delight enhancing many locales in the contemporary art world. Think of the delectable drips and swirls of confectionary color in installations by Neal Rock, inviting us to ponder magical fusions of painting and sculpture.
Or contemplate the colorful, blurry mixed-media works by Carlton DeWoody, who likes to show crowds of people who appear to be lost in their own thoughts. As a painter, Matilda Forsberg likes to focus on quiet moments of individuals captivated by paths charted by their own contemplative musings.
Attention must be paid to the vibrant graphics in collages and videos by the TM Sisters, which further allude to the swift pace of popular video games and digital toys, even as they question the hectic, greedy pace spinning today’s wildly material world.
In his installations, Joshua Levine excels in sculpting creatures that look at once familiar and bizarre. He playfully manipulates a palette from the toy box and candy store. But there’s an ominous edge to Levine’s creatures. They exude a deceptive charm, demanding us to think about unpredictable forces we may be letting loose in the land. We risk opening Pandora’s box when we play games with Mother Nature by trying too hard to reinvent the biological world.
Biology further comes into play in a video by Jim Roche about rural Florida and the not-always-healthy compulsion to create a utopian world that’s squeaky-clean and totally germ-free, a compulsion confirmed by the plethora of anti-bacterial soaps crowding supermarket shelves.
Like many contemporary artists, Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir brings her aesthetic sensibility to various creative efforts. She has created music videos, animation for films, and she belongs to the band Seabear. She collects objects that provoke her imagination. In a March 11, 2008 e-mail, she explains that she collects “old books, newspapers, postcards…I like things that have been used before, things that have soul.”
Art by Gregory Kucera takes inspiration from swift, violent natural disasters like cyclones, perhaps implying a wry comment on the dangerously escalating speed of the Internet and digital paraphernalia, which trample the quiet places that nurture our primal need for dreams and pleasures relishing life at a slow pace.
Drawing by Felice Grodin and mixed-media works on paper by Leigh Salgado exult in the slow, meticulous process of making art. With a seductive attention to details, they portray architectural fantasies that, especially in the case of Salgado, look ready to self-destruct in violent ruptures. Grodin evokes an airy, more free-flowing sense of structure that seems indebted to molecular patterns as the biological building blocks of life.
A collaborative video by Jiae Hwang and Nicholas C. Raftig III builds upon the artists’ interest in fantasy worlds and the human mind where dreams begin. Photography by Elizabeth Perikli can invite comparisons to outer space, providing another dimension to fascinations with worlds faraway, a vital aspect of the disarming and disturbing Dream(land) the artists and curator describe.
This show aims to celebrate the ineffable pleasures of dreams. They lead us deep into fantasy forests fertile with primal fears and desires. As curator, Annie Wharton makes the case that good and bad dreams are the true luxury goods in a society smitten with status and designer handbags, even while its very infrastructure is at risk from insidious dangers reshaping the world as we used to know it.
Elisa Turner is an art critic in Miami. She wrote the foreword about the recent history of the Miami art scene for the book Miami Contemporary Artists by Paul Clemence and Julie Davidow (Schiffer Books), which was launched during Art Basel Miami Beach 2007. Her writings about art have appeared in The Miami Herald, Arte al Dia, ARTnews, Art + Auction, and other publications. Her online column ArtCentric is at www.artcircuits.com |
