Twisting path between dreams and reality
At the center of the first image in Nancy Jackson’s “The Dreamer” -- a keenly mystical, 12-part series of gouache paintings -- is a fair-skinned male figure in a loincloth who sits in a lotus position on a patch of bare earth. This figure is the eponymous dreamer, whom we will follow over the course of the next 11 images, on a winding path between dream life and reality.
Inspired by the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, the series is an appealingly accessible exploration of some potentially daunting metaphysical questions.
In the first image, we find him suspended between his two worlds: in an archetypically idyllic landscape -- a river, trees, snow-capped mountains in the distance -- that is marred by a busy strip of freeway. In the ones that follow, he shifts from Edenic forests and peaceful oceans to living rooms and shabby street corners, struggling to disengage himself from earthly attachments and become one with the dream itself.
Accompanying each image is a sentence or two of text, written by Jackson, that suggests the terms of the struggle without dictating a particular narrative. “There is need of a whole world of torment in order for the individual to produce the redemptive vision,” reads one passage, alongside the image of the dreamer floating peacefully in a monster-infested sea. Another, posted beneath an image suggesting Adam and Eve, declares: “It is the lot of the dream to creep gradually into the narrows of personal fact, and to be treated by some later time as a unique event in history.”
The real poetry of the series is in the delicacy of the painting -- in the feathery white lines that make up the churning sea; the expressively twisted tree trunks; and the pale, willowy figures that seem as untainted by artistic pretension as they do by worldly concerns.
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‘The Dreamer’
Where: Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica
When: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; closed Sunday and Monday
Ends: Jan. 4
Price: Free
Info: (310) 828-8488
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