Les Voyages des Onironautes

Exhibition

Drawing, installation, painting, sculpture...

Les Voyages des Onironautes

Past: September 23 → October 19, 2011

The idea that sleep is a time of inactivity is one of the most basic and pernicious falsehoods humans have ever come to accept. When we sleep, our brains are chemically transformed into voraciously creative entities, our emotional control systems are set to overdrive, and our memories are carefully indexed and reviewed. Far from being a time of passive reflection, our nocturnal lives present us with clear evidence of the enormous creative abilities of every human alive.

Western art has held a long fascination with dreaming, perhaps most famously evident in the swirling mélange of imagery produced by the surrealists. But really what makes dreaming so compulsively interesting is not the presence of melting clocks and stilted elephants, but instead the sheer believability of the experience. We are absolutely convinced that some murderous psychopath is chasing us through a metro station and are filled with a genuine terror, or that a former lover has returned for one last fling and are filled with sincere longing, or that we are gently flying unassisted over the coast of Spain and are filled with a peculiar joy.

The artists in this exhibition all explore the emotionally turbulent worlds we create in the night, some through a direct engagement with dreaming itself and others by evoking the simultaneously murky and concrete imagery to be found there. Bravely venturing into the invisibility of the imagination, they have returned with odd souvenirs from their journey, strange totems that viewers can engage with to reactivate their own emotional and imaginative systems.

Benjamin Evans
  • Opening Friday, September 23, 2011 6 PM → 9 PM
Projective City Gallery
Map Map
13 Bibliothèque Zoom in 13 Bibliothèque Zoom out

34, rue Hélène Brion

75013 Paris

T. 06.78.34.44.62

www.projectivecity.com

Bibliothèque François Mitterrand

Opening hours

Wednesday – Sunday
Other times by appointment

The artists

  • Aurélie Belair
  • Jaclyn Conley
  • Siobhan McBride
  • Miranda Maher
  • Stephanie Brody-Lederman
  • Bethany Fancher