These days, it's hardly an exaggeration to call the evening news the stuff of nightmares. Between the implosion of Wall Street and the prospect of the other guy winning the election, the current state of national affairs might be enough to have you waking up in a cold sweat. Floridians in particular — at the mercy of an economy dependent on the battered industries of real estate and tourism — could use a good reverie to distract us from the horrors of reality.
Luckily, the Dunedin Fine Arts Center's latest exhibits offer a palliative in the form of dreams. In three complementary exhibits, works by about a dozen artists explore the pleasures of fantasy, from aspirations of world peace to idealized reminiscences of childhood. (A fourth exhibit showcases dreamy artwork by Pinellas schoolchildren and a fifth invites kids to engage in hands-on activities related to the theme.) Even bad dreams come up for the artistic treatment, but fear not — the worst of them isn't half as bad as what's happened to your 401K this year.
The centerpiece of Dreams is an interactive installation by Bay area artists Yoko Nogami and Maria Saraceno. The pair, both graduates of the University of South Florida's MFA program, began collaborating last year after they became involved in Home Bound, a public art project in Williams Park that constructed unconventional, sculptural "homes" in response to St. Petersburg's homeless problem. At the time, Saraceno explains, she began to wonder what the city's beleaguered homeless population dreamt about — so she started to ask them.
With the help of Nogami, she compiled videos of people — not only the homeless, but upper and middle class folks as well — recounting their dreams. In a spacious gallery at the DFAC, those videos are paired with a trio of desks where visitors are invited to record their own dreams on delicate slips of fibrous paper and clip them (if they choose) into a cloud-like mass of papers suspended from the gallery ceiling by wires. Since no visitor is compelled to sign her dreams — and the videos tightly crop the subjects' faces to reveal only their lips — the psychological safety of anonymity permeates the project. As a consequence, the installation offers little sociological insight into what sorts of dreams homeless people have versus wealthy people; instead, it leaves the mystery of dreaming, and its universality, intact.
"This is not about drawing conclusions, just opening a window into something very nebulous," Saraceno says.
(Many of the handwritten dreams are surprisingly amusing and ambiguous. I assume that spending a day with Hannah Montana would qualify as a good dream for a pre-teen girl, though it would be my own personal nightmare. And I'm thrown for a complete loop by the individual who dreamt of having their personal Zamboni stolen mid-ride.)
Another exhibit, The Impossible Dream, takes the form of a more traditional gallery show. In a separate DFAC gallery, it showcases sculptures, crafts and mixed media works by a range of artists from around the country and the world. Standouts include Gainesville-based artist Maggie Taylor's digital illustrations, which combine late-19th-century tintype portraits with images of found objects in fantastical vignettes and Jamey Grimes' improbably ethereal sculptures made from corrugated plastic. In an unusual move, DFAC has even included a public art project — a series of billboards produced collaboratively by the United Nations and international artists — in the form of smaller-scale reproductions; in each piece, an artist proffers an image of peace.
The Woodburnings of Daniel Mrgan spotlights the work of the up-and-coming Pinellas artist, who does his tongue-in-cheek best to live up to the caricature of artists as imaginative space cadets. (A wall label accompanying the exhibit lists his preoccupations as "enjoying good cereal … and daydreaming about walking on the moon wearing nothing but underwear.") In his delicately drawn woodburnings, Mrgan breathes life into a cast of human and anthropomorphized animal characters who inhabit a surreal world tinged with bittersweet feeling. From a doughy dude with a melting blockhead who weeps alone in the bathtub to a heavy-lidded tree that lets a tiny bird yank its loose tooth, Mrgan's characters seem to derive a perverse enjoyment from life's little agonies.
Take refuge in their lightness.
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2008.