12 May - 16 June 2012

Continuing Aimee Fairman’s exploration of psycho-geographical spaces and phenomenology, Endless Reverie presents an immersive installation of a speculative mind-space of forgotten memories and abandoned dreams. A psycho-geographical landscape can be considered as an inner, temporal, metaphysical mind-space of flux and ambiguity. The site of dream, reverie and memory, these inner worlds are raised to consider the role of landscape and the experience of time in psychological or imagined spaces.

Concretising an imagined cartography of the mind, Fairman envisages the brain and its storage centres that house memory, emotion, and dream as an immense labyrinthine landscape of tunnels, caves, chambers, vistas, forests, grottos and treasure troves. Each space appears interlinked, co-existing side by side in an elaborate web, in dimensional rather than linear time, reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel.”

Endless Reverie presents one of these speculative corners of the mind, which queries the fate of old memories of fantastical childhood dreams or beliefs. Through this, the fate of abandoned thought-scapes and their thoughtful occupants are brought into question to consider how time and the atmosphere of the forgotten weathers psychological realms.

Combining aesthetics of green-house cultivation, archaeological digs, subterranean calcite caves and mythological creatures, the work will synthesize conventions derived from Romantic ideals of metaphoric landscape with aspects of Kitsch to propose a sensibility of loss. Generating an oscillation between reality and imagination, experience and memory, and nostalgia and melancholy, the work mediates the ecologies of our inner and outer worlds.

Symptomatic of a rising interest in myth and magic among contemporary artists, (this) we can relate to the anxieties of climate change and environmental degradation. Counter to one’s expectations, the trend’s cast of monsters, mutants, fairies and witches aren’t starring as escapist fantasies, but in disturbing visions that articulate our collective sadness and fear. Artists have long turned to nature for comfort and inspiration in troubling times. The Romantics resisted the dehumanising effects of the Industrial Revolution by taking a renewed interest in the landscape. Today’s troubling blend of global conflict, civil unrest and economic collapse surely heralds another retreat to Arcadia; however, nature is no longer the safe port in a storm. With the human and natural worlds in disarray, we turn inward to our respective dream worlds, which are also, unexpectedly, plagued by disease, death and disorder.
– Vanessa Nicholas

For available works, please contact the gallery.