Daydream Topographies

‘Daydream Topographies’ is a duo-exhibition with my collaborator Audrey Doyle. We took the conventional two-person show as a point of departure, and exhibited alongside our work, collaborative paintings that we made together. The joint impetus for the exhibition was our ecological consciousness – mine developed through long distance bike rides in and out of the city, and Audrey’s through her numerous camping and road trips. The exhibition was as much about our relationship with the land as it is about the surreal, dreamlike, yet fantastical nature of painting, and the connections we make from that to each other, the landscape, and to our community.

Our layered, collaborative works began with an underpainting each for the other. While Audrey leaned on the side of representation, I gravitated more toward expressive gesture and pure color. The end results of the collaborative paintings contain snippets from both mine and Audrey’s imagination–an intertwining of the remnants from the initial underpainting, fused with our individual personal approach from the gestural to the naturalistic, a manifestation on a single canvas of both our identities, fantasies and dream worlds.

Taken together, ‘Daydream Topographies’ is an exhibition that brings the calm, soothing, and gentle nature of landscapes into a communal space, opening up conversations that range from the murky darkness of today’s deeply divided socio-political-ecological landscape, to a future fantastical world where ecofeminist gentleness, whimsical lushness and silver linings abode.