UNREAL
Central Gallery
April 5 to June 14, 2014
Curated by Daina Augaitis, Vancouver Art Gallery
Drawn primarily from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s permanent collection, Unreal presents work by artists who explore beyond the realm of what is considered real. Using inventive processes and unusual materials, they aim to unhinge us from our typical views of the world and open our eyes to the marvelous, the fantastical, the weird and even the monstrous.
The terrain of the unreal was systematically explored by artists in the early decades of the twentieth century. Informed in part by the ideas of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the surrealists strove to unleash repressed creative forces and to liberate the human imagination from the moral and sexual constraints of the conscious mind. Other movements such as Dada—and later Fluxus—worked to reveal the illogical and the absurd in everyday life. Their critiques of conventional thinking were powerful and their influence lingering. Artists since that time have continued to draw from and expand upon these movements' strategies, adapting them to expose and question our modern condition.
Some of the artists represented here draw on automatic processes: spontaneous gestures pursued in the absence of conscious control. Others conjure imaginary worlds, from the playful to the nightmarish. In numerous works, the human body itself is the site for communicating deeply buried desires or anxieties. Here it is transformed into something unfamiliar or even absurd. Alter egos and fictional selves are also explored to push the limits of order and acceptability. In other works, the most ordinary objects and materials are juxtaposed in seemingly arbitrary and incomprehensible ways, often past the point of recognition and into the realm of abstraction.
Mining the depths of the mind, the works in Unreal offer the opportunity to travel beyond the rational and consider the magnetic pull of the psychological in today’s art.
Unreal is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery with the generous support of the Killy Foundation.
Installation view of UNREAL
Photo: Kamloops Art Gallery
