Dream: Production Props and the Stages of the Unconscious Mind
W2021 ARCH562 Studio _ ClimateSF with Faculty Kathy Velikov
Dream: Production Props and Stages of the Unconscious Mind is a spectacle of provocations and hallucinatory scenes that presents the “Dream” as a production with props that facilitate the act of “dreaming”. Through the extrapolation of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), the secondary world of the production follows an archivist as he catalogs archived objects discarded by those as they migrate north to Camp Byrd in The Drowned World. Confronted with the depths of environmental and economic collapse, the archivist finds the only frontier of daily life not quite submerged and suffocating in the totality of the trauma and anxieties felt by conditions of The Drowned World is the “dreamscape”. Consumed by the presence of nostalgia in the furniture pieces of the archive, the archivist seeks to rediscover himself as he seeks his own relation to society, questioning the soul and identity of the furniture as he operates in their presence. Through the perversion of three domestic objects, the archivist reconfigures these objects that once mediated perception, a lampshade, a picture frame, and a vanity mirror in hopes of overcoming the soul of the pieces and seeing beyond the constructs of cultural production. As the archivist performs the Dream, the props prototyped in the lived reality manifest themselves, reconfiguring forms and interfacing with the archivist as he progresses deeper and deeper into the stages of sleep. Seeking to reconcile the divide between the dream world and the world of environmental collapse, the cautionary tale of Dream asks the viewer to reconsider the capitalistic production of objects, the sale of the image, the representation of lifestyle desires, and their soul and presence as it works upon the psyche.
