Exhibition Essay

‘… such stuff as dreams are made on’

Dreams and dreaming are a special, inalienable part of the human condition. They are the realms of our imaginings and of our greatest hopes and fears. In a crowded, teeming and contradictory world, they are our refuge and retreat, the private spaces of the heart and mind. It is in our dreaming that we construct our futures and remember our past. It was Shakespeare, wise in so much to do with the myriad ways of frail and vulnerable humanity, who observed of the strivings of mortal creatures: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’. For Aboriginal Australians, the whole sweep of their evolution as a people is expressed in what is called their Dreaming. In a world seemingly more divided than ever by fear, by divisions between religions and by the self-seeking appeal of politicians to the baser instincts of prejudice and human self-interest, the private space to dream is a precious territory. That space is to be honored and nurtured as a place of the imagining and where hope lies that the world might be remade as a better place. Martin Luther King’s great aspiration for racial justice and equality was expressed in his ringing declaration that reverberates still: ‘I have a dream! I have a dream!’

It is in the broad spectrum of dreaming from the most personal and particular to the universal and transcendent that this touring exhibition of small highly concentrated artworks has been conceived. Thirty artists, ten each from three countries, Australia, Canada and Germany, were invited to explore the theme — In Your Dreams. The challenge for each, working in a variety of different media — painting, print-making, sculpture, jewelry, textiles or sometimes in a mix of these different forms — was to produce a new artwork that could be fitted into a small traveling box to be sent on tour throughout from mid 2006 until mid 2009. The exhibition will have its first showing in Canada. It will move next to Germany and then to Australia. In the brief extended to the invited artists, the finished work was to sit snugly inside the box or to extend from it. It might be removed to hang on the wall, it might sit on a plinth or it might hang suspended from the ceiling.

The intriguing thing, now that the works have been created, is to see the way in which artists from different cultures and from different countries have responded to the interpretative possibilities of a common theme. The result is compelling and moving. The assembled works offer an intense highly focused distillation and blending of emotions, memories and fears. Many of them draw on a sense of tradition and of the enduring continuities of human and family life. Several of the works utilise old photographs, personal letters or cherished family recipes. Others feature the lovingly worn textures of found objects that have been appropriated and translated from the private domain to be shared and read no longer as the private and particular but as signposts to a larger human conversation and to evoke the shared experiences of people across generations and across cultures and distinct national traditions.

Many different discourses are present in this rich sampling of human experience and in the evocation of many different forms of dreaming. The Canadian artist Karen Cornelius is troubled by the subversion she sees in the contemporary world of the traditional ‘dreams of hope’ held out for the well-being of daughters. She notes that sexual harassment and sexual assaults, drug use or the requirements on young women to conform to stereotypical notions of feminine beauty pose a range of threats to family life. Others grieve for the assaults on traditional culture as the values once cherished by generation after generation are confounded or challenged by new realities and a new selfishness. Canadian Michael Boss, draws on his memories of growing up in a blue collar neighborhood in Winnipeg, to recall the brutalising injunction to young males in that culture to suppress their sensitivity: ‘Be tough. Be tough. Be tough’. This memory is both culturally specific and universal. It can apply to young men anywhere. In her modern day interpretation of the votive offerings that hang still in the doorways of houses in the rural villages of Greece and Italy, Australian Liz Jeneid reflects on the investment humans have made in the veneration of material objects as a means of confounding the dark forces that can subvert the aspirations of human dreaming.

Dreams can exist also as a kind of national ideal as in the shared Australian concept of the fair go for all, in the notion of a happy life or in the idea that fulfillment lies in the ownership of a home and in the tending of a plot of suburban garden. If for an increasing number or urban Australians, the home has now become a city apartment and the garden merely a collection of pots grouped together on a balcony, what is called ‘the great Australian Dream’ remains much as it always was. But as the artist Helen Sanderson suggests in her mixed media construction Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees, that shared dream of a people survives these days more as myth than reality as new inequalities — economic, racial or in the sharper than ever divide between the city and the country — take hold. Sanderson suggests that there are in fact many costs for the great Australian dream: the old democratic even-handedness that once motivated the nation now stands threatened and threadbare.

On the scale suggested by the testimony of Martin Luther King, the possibilities of dreams are vast, the faith indeed that can move mountains and turn back the sea. But dreams have other dimensions too — small, intimate, deeply precious and sometimes intensely private. As the Canadian artist Agatha Doerksen puts it, ‘a dream is someone’s bit of memory’. Dreams can come to us seemingly without warning or explanation in the dark and lonely reaches of the night. Sometimes they have an amazing clarity, remembered with ease and recalled, even long afterwards, in remarkable detail. Sometimes images or motifs recur. On other occasions the dream fades and blurs, residing half-remembered in the mind or buried somewhere deep in the subconscious.

The thirty works represented in this exhibition are deeply felt mediations on dreams and dreaming. They challenge, they delight, they celebrate and they mourn. In the best sense, they enrich our understanding of ourselves and others not in any narrow sense as Canadians or Germans or Australians but as members of the human family.

John Thompson

Canberra, 2006

John Thompson is a historian and writer with special interests in cultural history and the visual arts. Resident in Canberra, Australia for many years, he holds a PhD in History from the Australian National University. He has served as a member of the ACT Cultural Council, the arts funding body in the Australian Capital Territory and was Chair of the Visual Arts and Literature Committee of the Council.

The German artists asked Dr Heussler, Kunsthistorikerin, Stuttgart, to write an essay in German for their catalogue, which is reproduced here in the English translation.

When artists dream – In Your Dreams

We spend one third of our life sleeping. Dreams are the by-product of sleep and help deal with daily events. Daydreams and wishful thinking about adventure or danger, security and love animated by fantasy can also be considered dreams.

Currently, the subject of sleep and its companion dreaming is of more interest than ever. Sleeplessness, for instance, is now a widely spread phenomenon. Night shifts in hospitals, fire stations and television stations as well as nightly building security and cleaning services have become part of daily life and interfere with the natural rhythm of sleeping and waking.

Sleep is also a scientifically well-researched subject. It is well-known that sleep and the processing of daily events in form of dreams is essential to the human regenerative process, something that has been intensely examined in specially set up sleep laboratories. The surprising thing is that sleep is a highly active process although consciousness and activity are altered. The regenerative functions work at maximum capacity while physical performance as well as contact to the outside world are reduced.

There are five distinct phases of varying activity that take place during sleep. Our consciousness is present in all of them. Here is where dreams originate although these change, depending on the distinct phase of activity. In so-called REM sleep lively, less realistic dreams occur. In other phases thought-like memories are prevalent. It is interesting that only visual stimuli are engaged in dream sequences while other senses such as taste and smell are not affected.

Thirty artists at home on three continents, from Germany, Australia and Canada considered the topic of sleeping and dreaming for the exhibition “In Your Dreams”. The only requirement was to use a box conceived for transport for the art work – a so-called dream box. The thirty resultant art works show completely different ways of dealing with the theme of sleeping and dreaming. Childhood memories come up, wishes and hopes are formulated, terrifying visions take shape and fantasy goes on a journey.

Childhood Dreams

The duration and intensity of sleep is significantly higher among children than adults. A newborn can sleep for up to sixteen hours while elderly people only need five hours of sleep. And who doesn’t like to remember childhood times when all whishes and dreams seemed likely to come true?

Helen Sanderson deals with the old Australian dream of owning a house. The realization of this dream, however, leads to the ever-growing expansion of suburbs. Sanderson connects the dream of owning a home with a traditional Australian betting game, heads or tails. She uses an Australian penny for this purpose which shows on one side the typical Australian kangaroo which is part of the country’s coat of arms. Helen Sanderson also uses a popular Australian nursery rhyme to give a childishly naïve expression to the dream of home ownership: “Give me a home among the gum trees”.

Michael Boss evokes an American childhood dream in the year 1964: A young working-class boy dreams of freedom and a wild life. To him, the dream comes alive in motorbikes, rock’n’roll, whisky and cigarettes.

The trip back to childhood is also made by Sylvia Farago. She has designed a colourful Leporello from hand-crafted paper. This consists of memorabilia which she has collected during her lifetime from Hungary, Germany and South America. The artist connects three significant stages in her life to these three countries. She was born and raised in Budapest, she has lived in Germany for many years and a trip to South America was one of the most important in her life. The very personal dream of Sylvia Farago’s to take this last trip again is interwoven with this work.

Dreamtimes

Dreams are often journeys through time because they bring back to the surface things that happened long ago or which may even be long forgotten. In dreaming, we process and deal with events that have happened a long time ago.

Elaine Rounds prompts us to remember the transitoriness of time – past, present, future. Every moment in life brings with it different and new dreams which are meant to be realized in the here and now.

Wanda Aniko-Lützners 24-part work consists of nylon stockings, each torn in a different style and manner. In this way she refers to the manifold nature of life which, due to its brevity, she comprehends as a dream.

The four dream boxes created by Lene Rose Gruner can be arranged and combined in many different ways, appearing to evoke one memory to the next or the shifting of images in a dream. The viewer is invited to and can look at them from all sides and put them together in different order. By doing so, an infinite number of different possibilities results. Unknown and surprising things develop with each new combination. Each new connection results in a new and surprising image which always makes a different pictoral statement. The ambiguousness of the forms – both abstract and figurative – calls to mind the differing possibilities of dream interpretation as well as the lapses in time that can happen in dreaming.

A nostalgic journey in time is undertaken by Penny Carey Wells. She combines a hodgepodge of memorabilia consisting of grandma’s cookbook, unfinished embroideries and paper clippings, all of which refer to one particular moment in life already past.

At first glance, Karen Cornelius’ wooden box in which she stores nicely folded pillow covers with embroidery appears positively nostalgic. Together with an old-fashioned flower design of roses or forget-me-nots, a wish has been embroidered. But it is not part of grandma’s rich trove of wordly wisdom, as might be expected. Rather, it expresses the wishes and hopes articulated by 12 to 14 year-old teenagers: “No one ever listens to a fucking word I say”. Here Karen Cornelius wants to illustrate the difficulties experienced by adolescent girls who are exposed to high expectations growing up.

Dreams of a relationship

Love and interpersonal relationships are fundamental needs of humankind. No dream seems to be dreamt more often than the one of a fulfilled, happy love.

Corrie Wright’s work sees fashion designers as relationship agents. She interprets clothing foremost as an enabler of communication. Paper dresses and parts of cutting patterns serve to awaken interest. Contained in a drawer are small paper strips with words and terms alluding to interpersonal relationships.

The dream of partnership is represented in the exhibition in different forms. For Christine Huss love can build bridges. She shows a closely intertwined couple. However, one of the persons can only be seen as a vague silhouette. In this manner, Huss illustrates the daydream of a stable, loving relationship.

Delicately drawn geometric figures are contained in the gold folding box by Barb Flemington. Here, the artist is processing waking and dreaming moments into “meditations of love”.

Agatha Doerksen has designed the mirror image of a marriage in form of a piece of memory in which two elements are lying next to each other, closely tied and locked in a box, clearly showing the desire for liberation.

Dream Rooms

Who is not familiar with it, this dream of being caught in narrow dark rooms and the urgent wish to be set free?

The dream of a woman of being set free from a narrow, surreal looking room who is demonstratively holding up an exit sign to the viewer has been designed by Bev Jensen. In doing so, she is skillfully playing with quotations from art history with a twinkle in her eyes.

By contrast, in a room which seems to open through its mirrors, the dream of a puppet is fulfilled in Karina Stängle’s work. She turns into a famous “Dancing Queen” and tours the world with her own stage.

Degas’ dancer meets Stephan Lochner’s “Madonna im Rosenhag”, dragons protrude threateningly. A theatre stage serves Gerlinde Stingl to portray dreams as a laboratory, a place in which everything can be tested – in which travel to the past and the future is also possible.

Dream journeys

Dreams often show unexpected things, transport the dreamer into foreign regions never seen before frequented by strange beings.

And so we find an unusual couple shown as a double image in Jonathan Tse’s work. A green horse without (hind) legs and a jockey riding in the air undertake a ride together although separated in space.

The dream as a journey to unknown places and landscapes is portrayed by Caitlin Sheedy. The protagonists of her dream are floating through the night with their overly long arms and legs and encounter flying houses and airplanes with faces.

For Katherine Nix the journey takes place on the river of sleep. The journey leads through the beautiful and pleasant dreams but ends in dark and disturbing dream images.

Fay Jelly suggests a dreamlike journey into the interior of various objects. Things that appear familiar begin to change and appear mysterious and ambiguous.

Nightmares

The shift from pleasant dreams to those causing fear and terror is fluent. Good dreams may end badly and bad dreams may dissolve into pleasure.

The dream of Bonnie Marin has degenerated into a nightmare. In the interior of her box, girls dressed in sexy underwear in the style of the fifties loll about on beds, armchairs or TV sets. A dachshund even risks an irritated glance at a long-legged blond. The depiction of the exterior, however, seems to be taken from a horror movie. An over-proportionately large bat hovers above a dark house in a threatening manner, a leafless twig drearily looms into the picture.

The interior of Diana Thorneycroft’s dream box appears to be inspired by a horror movie or science fiction. The opened zipper reveals a creature, half insect, half human being, that seems to originate from a different star.

Shirley Brown also devotes her attention to the shift between dream and nightmare. She tells the story of a bird which gets lost and dies while traveling south. Years later, the bird is artificially brought back to life by an artist in her books and art works. One of these artifacts is apparently found in the interior of a red box. The mysterious remains of an unknown creature appear as if magnified through a porthole.

“Pinch me, I must be dreaming” is the title of Renate Quast’s work. She invites reflection in her reference to political and social events.

Dream colours

Are dreams black and white or in colour? This question is almost impossible to answer. Dreams are individual phenomena and we all experience our dreams in a different manner.

Helen Müller’s “Book of the Deep” made of extremely delicate black-white patterned organza which can be turned like the pages of a book is a symbol for diving into the dark black waters of a dream.

Using a plastic box, plastic cups, calling cards and black and white striped hair bands, Sibylle Burr creates a contemporary still-life. As in the still-lifes of the Dutch masters, she reminds us of the theme of vanitas, the transience of all that is wordly. She supports her statement by quotes from the Sermons of Salomon: “What is the gain to man of all of his effort which he has under the sun (OT, Sermons 1,2)”.

By contrast, Rosemary Penfold presents the sparkling colours of a rainbow which are to resemble the many facettes of human existence.

Hildegard Koldin, too, designs the dream path in glowing colours. The tracks and arches show new possibilities which can open up for our life in a dream.

Dreaming appears as a colourful life in Elke Gaiser’s work who is the only self-taught artist to participate. Bright colours are found in nature as well as in our fantasy. Her work stands for the abundance of our world which should be protected rather than destroyed.

Catching dreams

The wish to catch dreams and to hold on to them is very old. Certain Indian tribes use especially crafted dream catchers for this purpose.

In creating practically recycled forms and figures out of metal tins, Liz Jeneid seeks to track the fulfillment of dreams and wishes. The gleaming silver animal figures and heart-shaped forms evoke the votive images used by the Catholic church to aid believers in visualizing their wishes and hopes. Liz Jeneid was inspired to do so by a journey through Italy and Greece. She realized that small votive images are sold there which play an important role in the lives of the local population.

Craig Love uses dream catchers which he has himself fabricated from unusual materials as a way to combat sleeplessness and bad dreams.

As through a kaleidoscope, the exhibition “In Your Dreams – when artists dream”, shows the personal manner in which 30 artists from Germany, Australia and Canada deal with the topic of sleeping and dreaming. From the memory of things past, to dealing with the present, extending to good wishes for the future, many different aspects of dreaming, both nightly dreams and day dreams or wishful thinking are represented.

Dr. Carla Heussler

Dr Carla Heussler, Kunsthistorikerin, Stuttgart, Germany

‘… such stuff as dreams are made on’

When artists dream – In Your Dreams

Childhood Dreams

Dreamtimes

Dreams of a relationship

Dream Rooms

Dream journeys

Nightmares

Dream colours

Catching dreams

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