Dreams are defined by vivid or memorable images, emotions and sensations that occur during different stages of sleep. Although the content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, they have been a huge topic in terms of science, psychology and religion interest throughout history. Many approve the Freudian theories about dreams - that they give insight into hidden desires and emotion, whereas others believe that dreams assist in memory formation, problem solving or simply are a product of random brain activation. Dreams play a substantial role in helping us cope with grief, stress and traumas. Most of our dreams are actually unpleasant; the most common emotions in dreams include fear, guilt, anxiety and helplessness. Moreover, anxiety dreams can be helpful – one theory is that we are working through our anxieties and more able to see what stresses us during the day. Dreams are an opportunity to work through things that frighten us in real life, to play out worst-case scenarios in an environment where they have no consequences. In order to get through the day, we have to edit out so much of what is going on around us, and if we pay attention to our subconscious and our dreams we get a different angle on our lives and issues. When we’re dreaming, we’re thinking in a state we never have access to by day. Dreams offer the opportunity to think in a different way and show new answers to problems, they often contain the seeds of something important.
The key themes that I thought of are: sleep, fiction, emotion, imagination. For further expansion I did word association:
Sleep: calmness, rest(less), mattress, insomnia, REM, fatigue, eternal, disturbed
Fiction: fake, utopian/dystopian, surrealism, supernatural, storytelling, speculative, mythic
Emotion: anxiety, sadness, empathy, jealousy, hatred, overwhelming, passionate
Imagination: originality, sensibility, idealism, contemplation, picturesque, stimulation.
Using the keywords above I have found some interesting articles:
“Les yeux de W” at Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie” is an exhibition containing the work of the French artist Laura Lamiel, which takes the viewer’s body and mind on an inner journey through a succession of rooms through which one roams and crosses like the recesses of a memory that is sometimes vivid, sometimes buried, at times radiant, now gloomy. In this exhibition, the details act like the synapses of an infinite brain in which spaces fit squarely inside one another, getting divided, reflected and wrapped. The letter W’s dual and symmetrical structure indicates one way of approaching the journey. Laura Lamiel has been creating minimalist abstract landscapes that defeats our perception of reality in every possible way. By combining quirky deceptions, symmetries and plays of mirrors, Laura Lamiel’s sculptures, installations, photographs and drawings disrupt our perspective while causing new images to emerge. In a reality that seems to be constantly slipping away, Laura Lamiel’s work keeps the perspective tense and radiates perception into the depths of an inner experience. The artist constructs each of her works with an unparalleled meticulousness, combining smooth and gritty, hot and cold materials. White enameled steel, plexi-glass and neon are combined with varnished wood, copper, incense granules, but also with fabric, paper and cotton. The exhibition presents cell structures at the scale of human body. These are work and thought spaces in which the artist has placed stripped-down forms, but also archives, gloves and tissues that seem to have traveled through time, their worn-out appearance obstructing the calm, silent organization of the works. Laura Lamiel gives a significant level of attention to these tiny objects and fragments of life, bringing every focal distance of the eyes into play. From the finest detail to the overall space, the artist invites us to look in every way possible, under, through or from behind, while bringing to the surface what we tend to neglect, treating blind spots as quintessential looking-spaces.
The anxious art of Liana Finck: the New York cartoonist posts on Instagram her observations of urban life and how its etiquette is breached. “I think it inspires my Instagram drawings because I use those mostly to figure out things that are bothering me and make sense of them.” Somewhat ironically, it’s those drawings that draw the most negative response on Instagram. Finck’s keen observation of human behavior reflects intense awareness – to the point of self-consciousness – of her own. She frames her work as “noticing how civilization works” – moments when the urban fabric is momentarily pulled tight. If you do not pay these trivial violations any mind, it may be because city living fosters a certain obliviousness, a thicker skin. But not everyone develops it. “Sometimes I feel like a person who notices these things in a world of blind people who don’t”.
Next, we have Tracey Emin with her own reassembled bed, from when she used to live in a council flat in Waterloo, exhibited in Tate Britain for the first time in 15 years. She describes her work, “My Bed”, as a portrait of a young woman. It shows her real bed at the time in all its embarrassing glory, with used condoms, dirty underwear and empty bottles of alcohol strewn across the crumpled stained sheets. Emin had expressed her wish for the piece to go to a museum and described the Tate as “the natural home” for the work. Emin herself was very involved in how the work was to be presented, and it sits in a gallery alongside two Francis Bacon’s paintings, his 1951 Study of a Dog and his 1961 Reclining Woman, as well as six of her drawings that Emin gifted to the Tate to mark the occasion. Emin said part of the reason she had been so keen to have the work back at Tate Britain was to have a chance to change people’s original perceptions of the piece.“It’s really important to me to show it in context,” she said. “When I showed it originally at the Tate Britain as part of the Turner prize, nobody even bothered looking at the work that surrounded it, even though there were my watercolours, my drawings. So, what’s really great by having the Bacons around it, people will look at the Bacons and they will understand the connection with the bed and my other drawings. They will see the bed is art and that, with these incredible artworks around it, it is in good company.” what would be the most suitable companions, and she was involved in selecting the paintings that would be shown alongside her work. Emin considered that Francis Bacon was a very immediate answer to the question of who would be the most suitable companion to have his/her art shown alongside Emin’s, because there are wonderful reference’s between their work. There is this sheer vitality of the body that moves in spaces combined with a sense of internal turmoil.
Valerio Nicolai, an Italian artist, has a series of works entitled “Amarena”, exhibited in Milan, which is dedicated to that particular moments when everything we thought we knew falls and certainties fall down, personal apocalypses perceived as absolute, moments in which our vision of the world alters and turns to red. The material he uses already contain its own story and his artworks emerge as the result of an exchange of questions and answers between the artist and his creation. The name “Amarena” might recall an idealized childhood, an eternal start of summer spent climbing trees to eat fruits, ice cream cones bought by grandparents, but it could easily be the name of a devastating climatic event, a typical storm originated off the Brazilian coasts. The red dominant of the works is the color of the stage Nicolai interposes between subjective and objective realities in contrast. The images above represent 2 of his works, “Toilette”(the red painting) and “II festeggiato” (the red sculpture).
“What does idealism get you today? Abuse, derision, or sometimes prison”
The world is holding its breath and it's stifling. Ever since the financial crash, there's been a sense of stasis, of waiting to see what emerges. As the wait goes on, the feeling of possibility becomes more overwhelming. The comical slogan that appeared in the immediate wake of the crisis, "Keep calm and carry on", makes all right-thinking people want to go mad. But that's largely because people aren't just keeping calm. A common air of resignation has taken over. There's lots of protest on social networking sites, lots of declarations, petitions, information. Yet, this feels like converted people are preaching to each other, their ideas and beliefs only gaining traction when opponents resort to anonymous abuse and threats. Far from bringing people together, social networking sometimes seems only to reveal the depths of our division.
With “From Anxiety to Volition”, the Kunstmuseen Krefeld is showing the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to Ludger Gerdes. With the beginnings of postmodernism in the late 1970s, Ludger Gerdes introduced a new communicativeness to sculpture and installation art—after Minimal and Concept Art. He dealt with architecture, nature and historical aesthetic concepts, as well as modernism, the public space and art’s relevance for society. His art is based on architectonic quotations, metaphors, abstractions and figurations, stagings, the pictorial quality of sculpture and word acrobatics. He assembled these recurring modules into models of thought and narratives whose structures or conclusions deliberately remain open. Models that show the world on a small scale, trees that symbolize the relationship between culture and nature, paintings that are sculptures, words that fall out of everyday speech and a man wearing a top hat who views a painting in one moment and disappears the next.
The relationship between dreams and art is a strong one, having in common the idea that both can be either real or unreal. They complete each other replacing what it is with what might be and they are both exposed at different interpretations. Take, for instance, the extraordinary work of the 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who used the fantastical and the grotesque to explore morality and mortality, depicting scenes from his dreams and visions.
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