In Dreams Begin

A group show curated by Now Curation. The Fitzrovia Gallery, W1T 08/02/22-13/02/22

Becky Lyon, The Last Cochineal, Kelly Ballett, Araceli Gómez Castro, Javier Iniesta

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