In dreams begin

‘... dragging me through the lobby of the theatre into the light, and I woke up into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.’

And so abruptly ends Delmore Schwartz’s 1937 short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” from which our exhibition takes its title. Like Schwartz’s narrator, we are dragged into wakefulness, emerging from the past into the bleak winter. The shapes of our dreams dissolve as we reach for them, our familiar worlds suspended mid transfiguration. Both one thing and the other, the dreamscape shivers as we grab at it, unruly forms dissipating into dust. Already half forgotten, traces settle on rooftops and windowsills, snagging on clothes and hair, burr-like. Emotional and sensory residue accumulates in the corners of our minds, the ambiguity and metamorphosis of the dream world seeping into the everyday.

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In Dreams Begin examines the dream as a site of personal and cultural renewal. NowCuration

presents new works that follow the pathfinders of our unconscious into unknown and intimate futures. In Javier Iniesta’s intricate drawings, we find the hidden relics of encrypted cosmologies. Araceli Gómez Castro will perform H, a ritual unearthing the sacred and sensual properties of roots, aluminum, and the dream. Kelly Ballett’s paintings and salt loaves dissect the phantasmagoric accessories of media and vernacular culture; fragmenting and rewriting their ‘architectonic auto-fictions.’ Snack packs and mixtapes for a final journey to the sun are provided by The Last Cochineal, whose work reimagines what care and comfort means for the end of the ego. Becky Lyon’s scent intervention - Leaf Hearing Blue, Moss Tickling Soil - will perfume our surreal gathering.

Come, join us, in the place where dreams begin.