In Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New
May 1 – August 1, 2016
Sculpture Center
44-19 Purves Street, LongIsland City, New York 11101
Featuring newly commissioned works by Christopher Aque, Phillip Birch, Onyedika Chuke, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Tamar Ettun, Raque Ford, Jeannine Han, Elizabeth Jaeger, Meredith James, Jamie Sneider, Patrice Washington, Tuguldur Yondonjamts
Curated by SculptureCenter’s 2016 Curatorial Fellow Olga Dekalo.
The title of this exhibition, taken directly from Freud’s lecture on dreams, is a sentence stopped midway. He completes the thought by stating that the creative process of the mind can only regroup elements from already existing sources—that any one creative fantasy is a work of translating what one knows of reality into an imaginary space. The exhibition, organized from proposals for new work submitted through SculptureCenter’s annual open call, borrows from the operation of the dream composite—what Freud termed “condensation”—to foreground practices that employ the means of combining and blending often contradictory elements into a collective image. The artists in the exhibition each propose fantastical places or narratives that are differentiated by distinct material approaches.
If the purpose of recreating fantasies of one’s psychic life is to tease out questions of being, the exhibition’s composed scenes are a result of an almost obsessive inner-directedness. Whether cast, traced, projected, or fragmented, the self is designated as the site and source of formation, assuming various forms and gestures that are both physically absolute and psychologically uncertain. When inclined to ascribe a specific meaning to the work, the concept of the composite serves as a reminder that visual representations are mental acts of transformation, distortion, and abstraction of our many thoughts, memories, and desires. (greenspringsschool.com) These assemblages of artistic wit—a blend of fragments that comprise a larger composition—unprivilege the notion of an exclusive object and instead seek to propose connections between multiple elements in an effort to offer clues to scenarios that appear unequivocally bizarre.
