The Art of Dreaming

At a private viewing at James Barron Art, the by-appointment contemporary American and European gallery space Barron shares with his wife, celebrity portrait photographer Jeanette Montgomery Barron, guests were asked to examine the beauty and ugliness of an addiction to futile dreaming. “Without a king, everybody wants some heaven,” is a re-imagined installation of previous work by the collaborative artist duo Lauren Was and Adam Eckstrom, known together as Ghost of a Dream.

Frequent New York commuters will recognize their work on display last fall in Penn Station as part of the design installation concept “Art at Amtrak” curated by Debra Simon. That piece, “Aligned by the Sun (Connections),” combined photographs of sunsets from 200 people from countries across the world, a unification of views and dreams beyond borders. In “Without a king,” dreams remain the subject, but this time the material was lottery tickets.

“This work was originally presented in 2011 at a Northern Italian church in Bologna called Santa Maria Della Vita, all laid out on the floor of their oratorio. The church had beautiful mosaic work on the floor but the tiles were all faded, so we wanted to create these vibrant pieces that looked like they levitated off the floor,” said Was. The late-Baroque Roman Catholic church, located in the historic Quadrilatero district, home to Bologna’s oldest marketplace, is also home to the 1463 sculptural group “Lamentation Over the Dead Christ” by Niccolò dell’Arca. Ghost of A Dream offered an installation with a more contemporary subject, and potentially less anguish than dell’Arca’s terracotta drama — although that depends on the viewer.

“We wanted to relate the ideas between religion and the lottery — how different people conceive of different hopes and dreams.”

Shaped into geometric star and snowflake patterns on the walls of James Barron Art, the pieces by Was and Eckstrom are not printed wallpaper, but crafted from real lottery tickets, scratches, and dashed dreams and all. Like their cull of sunset photos, Ghost of a Dream’s prime source of the material is other people and the common threads that connect them.

Based in the hamlet of Wassic, N.Y., Was and Eckstrom have been a part of the artist-run nonprofit artist residency The Wassaic Project nearly since its beginning, and continue to reinvent their material for each new installation — from lost playing cards to discarded artists’ catalogs.

Ghost of a Dream’s installation “Yesterday is Here” is currently on view through the summer at the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM) in Boston, Mass.

Photo by Brian Wilcox

Photo by Brian Wilcox

Photo by Brian Wilcox

  

Photo by Brian Wilcox