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Lot Essay
The telling of dreams presents us with a challenging paradox: They are often most compelling to those who have them, and lose all allure in their representation, visual or otherwise. Jim Shaw manages to overcome this challenge in 20 Selected Dream Drawings. He does so by explicitly tying his exploration of his own dreams to Freud's theory of the uncanny--the uncomfortable assemblage of familiar and nostalgic images that congeal into something engagingly bizarre.
Shaw's drawings, however, are not merely ungrounded explorations of the surreal. Instead, they are united by an impish confessionality, skilled draftsmanship, and the ability to engage (and deny) a viewer's desire to understand and explore the unconscious of another person.
The artist's dreams are expressed as a combination of technical and casual drawing. A pop-surrealist universe emerges, bound only by the comic-frame organization. In their abstract narrative quality, the images are similar to both storyboard drawing and graphic cartoons. The artist restrains himself in line and frame, but also allows for gestural excess and the insertion of vignettes, exploding some frames and fracturing others.
Unlike less accessible imagery of some contemporary art, Shaw's "remote control aesthetic" (Michael Duncan, Art in America December 2000) allows the viewer to weave in and out of his scenes with a kind of manic delight. The Green Lantern character may appear differently in each person's dream, but locates the artist in a specific time, history, and culture.
At once routine and perverse, some themes in these drawings are universal, while others are clearly drawn from the quintessentially over-stimulated American male psyche. "Like the best portraiture, Shaw's project evokes the ineffable complexity and insistent perversity of the human species," writes one critic. "Reflecting back on his other projects, his dream works demonstrate how the mind is a kind of thrift-store repository of both direct and mediated perceptions" (ibid.). That such visual cues pop up in the recognizable format of a cartoon drawing with no beginning or end encourages an understanding of dreams as an aggressive reshuffling of common cultural and emotional cues. In Shaw's dreamscapes, the adolescent mingles with the adult and the innovent with the deviant.
This magnificent set of dream drawings reveals Shaw's identification of dreams as constituitive of the self. Importantly, these works were first made as experiments in self-analysis and artistic discovery. Shaw then decided to share them with an audience. In the same way the start or conclusion of a dream escapes our memory, these drawings seem to lack a beginning or end. Indeed, the titles of later sculpture demonstrate an intellectualization of semi-unconscious representation through drawing. His sculpture Dream Object (I was working on a piece that was like a human torso, possibly real, and I was placing objects in the head that was like a cupboard) reveals the artist's intent to work through nebulous and non-sensical mental images to form something more concrete.
Shaw's distinctly modern embrace of the cognitive dissonance of his own mind is shared with his audience. Pop perversion is either pleasing or frightening, depending on our individual interpretations and experiences of modern media and commerce. Jim Shaw has explored the cutting and reshuffling of the dream in challenging and surprising ways, leaving us in awe of his fantastic universe.
Shaw's drawings, however, are not merely ungrounded explorations of the surreal. Instead, they are united by an impish confessionality, skilled draftsmanship, and the ability to engage (and deny) a viewer's desire to understand and explore the unconscious of another person.
The artist's dreams are expressed as a combination of technical and casual drawing. A pop-surrealist universe emerges, bound only by the comic-frame organization. In their abstract narrative quality, the images are similar to both storyboard drawing and graphic cartoons. The artist restrains himself in line and frame, but also allows for gestural excess and the insertion of vignettes, exploding some frames and fracturing others.
Unlike less accessible imagery of some contemporary art, Shaw's "remote control aesthetic" (Michael Duncan, Art in America December 2000) allows the viewer to weave in and out of his scenes with a kind of manic delight. The Green Lantern character may appear differently in each person's dream, but locates the artist in a specific time, history, and culture.
At once routine and perverse, some themes in these drawings are universal, while others are clearly drawn from the quintessentially over-stimulated American male psyche. "Like the best portraiture, Shaw's project evokes the ineffable complexity and insistent perversity of the human species," writes one critic. "Reflecting back on his other projects, his dream works demonstrate how the mind is a kind of thrift-store repository of both direct and mediated perceptions" (ibid.). That such visual cues pop up in the recognizable format of a cartoon drawing with no beginning or end encourages an understanding of dreams as an aggressive reshuffling of common cultural and emotional cues. In Shaw's dreamscapes, the adolescent mingles with the adult and the innovent with the deviant.
This magnificent set of dream drawings reveals Shaw's identification of dreams as constituitive of the self. Importantly, these works were first made as experiments in self-analysis and artistic discovery. Shaw then decided to share them with an audience. In the same way the start or conclusion of a dream escapes our memory, these drawings seem to lack a beginning or end. Indeed, the titles of later sculpture demonstrate an intellectualization of semi-unconscious representation through drawing. His sculpture Dream Object (I was working on a piece that was like a human torso, possibly real, and I was placing objects in the head that was like a cupboard) reveals the artist's intent to work through nebulous and non-sensical mental images to form something more concrete.
Shaw's distinctly modern embrace of the cognitive dissonance of his own mind is shared with his audience. Pop perversion is either pleasing or frightening, depending on our individual interpretations and experiences of modern media and commerce. Jim Shaw has explored the cutting and reshuffling of the dream in challenging and surprising ways, leaving us in awe of his fantastic universe.