FORTH COMING

“My dream is past; it had no further change. It was of strange order, that the doom Of these two creatures should be thus traced out Almost like reality—
the one to end in madness—
both in misery.”
The Dream by Lord Byron

Forth Coming is about an exhibition, a curator, an artist and their dreams.

How do dreams come about?

Like with exhibitions, into the subconscious concoction of a dream, pours labour: Dream work is conducted with things picked up during the day, wish fulfillment and the mind’s cleaning team covering up any traces of unconscious desire, so that one can awake with a restored sense of proper self. Similar to the entanglement of associations in language structure, it is not uncommon for some symbolic things to be condensed or displaced in dreams. At the same time, dream content reveals the failure to realise the wish. I like to compare it to hiding the body of your boss, whom you thought to have murdered, and then proclaiming: “Oh, I really want to kill that guy, but he is never around”.

My curator dreams he is a vampire. He even rests like one. The vampire doesn’t work, but I have set Adam to it. He will make his dream come true through some very thorough needlework. The vampire is a sterile collector, focused on preservation and presentation. He possesses select taste and is an enigmatic figure of the night. But you know, who would the teletubbies be without belly telly?

As reclusive participants, they seem to rarely leave the confines of the castle. And in the ancient halls of the white cube, without time-space but with good lighting, always, blasting, with no dark corner to escape to, the vampire is uncannily omnipresent. And everything else is totally exposed, vulnerable. Everything is filled with the vampire, like the curator leaving a certain touch on things without being visible themselves. Every facet bears the indelible imprint, an intangible influence upon objects, dreams, worlds,and the tangible reality they nurture. Because the vampire is a horticulturist of manifest and latent (dream) objects. The manifest object hides the latent dream object. But is not to be discarded as phantasmagoric, as the choice of object manifesting is telling.

The white cube is there to hide the curator around which it is structured. Like the castle for the vampire, and the dream for the individual, it is architecture to uphold and to shell.
So why a vampire, Adam? Where is the artist in the art? What and whose latent object is this?

As for the artist, there is the subconscious working against one’s self, to stop you from realising which wishes are being fulfilled in your dreams. They might be repressed and damaging desires, which do come true in the guise of something surreally other, but do not appear as the true monstrosity they are.

These times are a fucking nightmare and you can’t hide anywhere in your dreams.

pictures by Adam Grainger