The Fleeting Dream

The Fleeting Dream subtly manipulates our sense of reality. Paintings, video and photographic works probe our memories, facilitating an experiential moment in the ‘real’ and the illusory. Within them the exhibition explores different layers of personal emotions and the possible connotations behind daily settings. These works by artists Pat Brassington, Helen Johnson, James Lynch and David Noonan—held in the Buxton Collection—reconstruct familiar scenes into something dreamlike, fleeting and fragile.

The photo-collage works by Brassington and Noonan—grouped together—exemplify the artists' explorations of the unfamiliar in the familiar. The pair distort elements of the everyday, defamiliarising the ordinary to convey a dreamlike atmosphere. Presenting scenes charged with tension, memory, and the slippery space between waking life and imagination, the artists invite viewers to question the boundaries between the ordinary and the uncanny. Brassington's Wool 1999 distorts the familiar innocence of the boy into something serene and unsettling. The hazy, dreamlike glow was disrupted by the mysterious textured foreign tongue. This twists reality into an enchanting and disembodied space. While Noonan’s Untitled #6 2005 and Visitors 2005 both transform the ordinary living space into a dreamlike and ritualistic stage and evoke nostalgic emotions. These works provoke an atmosphere that blurs reality and illusion, setting an essential tone for the exhibition.

Further disrupting the familiar, Johnson’s History Problem 2013 displaces itself from the closeness of Brassington, Lynch and Noonan; its depth counter to the stillness of the figures frozen in acrylic. The painting probes the tension between reality and memory. Australia's colonial and national histories are layered, and contested, lived in one way but remembered in another. A collective memory endures fragmentation, resembling a fleeting dream that is open to distortion. Johnson reveals this problem colonial history is subjected to, and disrupts the authority of colonial imagery in History Problem by highlighting the transient nature of the stories societies tell themselves in an attempt for solace. Lynch, beside Johnson, finds movement in the colours, the familiar motion of life brimming with the surreal as elephants occupy family rooms and metaphorical texts push women into water. Lynch’s The Party’s Over 2006 is firmly rooted in the familiar (albeit surreal), as it evokes fleeting memories and the spirit of human emotion. The form of this work—a jumpy, constantly shifting and frame-skipping video style—reflects the complex and unsettled nature of emotions, multiplying dreams from reality. The movements of the video loops contrast with the static tension of the painting, while personal emotions and collective memories echo each other, creating an intertextual relationship. This dual narrative reveals the multifaceted nature behind personal emotions and memories, expressed in these works through exaggerated artistic techniques. It also echoes our theme: the inherent instability and vast interpretive space of dreams as elusive entities. The pair of works invite the viewer to find familiarity within the unfamiliar; to comfortably (or uncomfortably) reside within the boundaries put forth by Brassington and Noonan.

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life.

(Kathleen Stewart, 2007, Ordinary Affects)

Collected, The Fleeting Dream posits an unusual within the usual; an exploration of the facilitatory surreal in investigation of a reflexive moment. Our shifting assemblages of the ordinary define how we perceive ourselves and our experiences. In investigating this relationship, the works of The Fleeting Dream facilitate a reflexive, affectual experience in the ‘real’ and the illusory. In this, we find ourselves ‘connected’ to the works, or more accurately: to the assemblages within them.

Artists: Pat Brassington, Helen Johnson, James Lynch and David Noonan.

Curated by Wei Ren, Seven Shen, Betty Yao, Jasmin Wu, Hugo Webster, Charlotte Wik,

Xuan Zhang, Zoey Zhou, and Dawn Zhu.