In Your Dreams 11 May - 17 June 2000


Press Release

In Your Dreams 11 May - 17 June 2000 FA1 contemporary art at 20 Denmark Street, London, UK. Private View Wednesday 10 May 6-8 pm

Salvador Dali Simon English Masakatsu Kondo Saskia Olde Wolbers Hadrian Pigott David Reisman In Your Dreams brings together a group of works as a record of an obsession, or a curiosity. A Salvador Dali sketch of around 1936 could hold a clue to their relation. Architectural oddities, a camel, a figure, a mask smoking a pipe, the typically improbable conjunction of jarring elements suggests the layering of thoughts in the mind, of images in sleep. Hadrian Pigott's short film Dream (1995) presents such an image. A white porcelain sink fills the frame. The film starts with the act of hand washing, a ritual which might have made reference to the compulsive repetition of Nauman but soon acquires a quite different resonance, as the washer transfers his attention to the sink itself. David Reisman's drawings seem at first to have a more direct relation to dreams. In a series of small notebooks he records images and narratives from the previous night's sleep. On inspection, their apparently simple relation to their unconscious source becomes uncertain. They seem to oscillate between record and invention. There's something of the same uncertainty about Saskia Olde Wolbers' video narratives. A camera tracks through painstakingly fabricated landscapes as heavily accented voice-overs relay fantastic and fanciful narratives. Shown on Eye-Treks, futuristic virtual-reality glasses with video screens inside, they become disembodied image, set free from monitor, wall or support. Masakatsu Kondo's paintings of Mountains are well known. Other landscapes feature now, whether impossibly vibrant forests or arid deserts. But what remains is the promise these paintings hold, to revisit places you might have seen. In Simon English's compositions, time, place and scale are condensed and displaced. Drawings of hybrid figures, drawings from fantasy desire or fear, drawings of groups in anonymous embrace cohabit their surfaces. In his new work, shown here for the first time, these vignettes leave their support to animate the gallery walls. Like works in a collection, in a home, the works in In Your Dreams find themselves in uneasy relation to one another, disparate but engaged. For further information and images please contact Zo‘ Foster or Nicholas Baker on 020 7691 4321 Exhibition open Wednesday - Saturday 12 pm - 6 pm

The exhibition is open to the public.