7 - 28 july 2007
Opening: Saturday 7 July 2007,  5-7pm

> A NOSTALGIA FOR DREAMT PLACES by Daniel Feinberg

 

Exhibition view: mock up                      

A NOSTALGIA FOR DREAMT PLACES follows Daniel Feinberg’s first exhibition at the Gallery Premises in 2006. This dexterous young artist has moved from his exuberant painting style to computer graphics, employed here to produce large scale ‘canvases’ depicting a series of the artists recurring dreams. Having worked for some time now in the interior design and architecture industry Feinberg uses ‘virtual-environment’ software to render an almost synthetic reality within the landscape of his dreams. From a body of 26 works, eight have been selected for large scale reproduction (2.5m x 3.5m) designed to create an immersive experience for the viewer.

 

Ascension 2007                                                     The Examination 2007

Artist's statement:

The feeling of alienation and discomfort in a space which paradoxically has become comforting in its familiarity due to endless repetition and reoccurrence in my dreams is rendered in this collection. The spaces and places in this body of work carry these emotions of loneliness, tension, discomfort and disembodiment which are found in my dreams since I was a child. These spaces are normally a synthesis of a few places and objects I have visited and interacted with in waking life. They have become signifiers of my mental existence and because they are repeated in different combinations, have created a subjective system of language which I am attempting to interpret through this body of work. These new hybrid “mind” spaces are visited and revisited at different stages in my life and have become associative with certain emotional states.

Because they are not physically manifested spaces I have chosen CG technology to illustrate them as there is a parallel between the virtual world which has been created and sustained by computers and the world created in our own minds on a subconscious as well as conscious level in that they are both not materially manifest.  CG rendered images also have a tendency to be “too perfect” or hyper real and this I have used as a tool to create compositions which have a certain sense of being sterile, artificial and unreal.

“So many diverse meanings are established beneath the surface of the image that it presents only an enigmatic face and its power is no longer to teach but to fascinate… Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organised it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.

Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge.  Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form.  Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself;  between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens.  It is free for the dream.”

Michel Foucalt, Madness and Civilzation-A History of Insanity in an Age of Reason.