I went to Blackpool the other day and happened across one of the most interesting exhibitions I've been to in a long time.
The Grundy Art Gallery is currently exhibiting the work of Zoe Beloffand her show
Dreamland - The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and the
Blackpool Chapter.
Below is the more information on the show and its display time.
I really feel like I could have spent all day here reading and looking at all the things in this exhibition. It has made me feel confused and left me longing to try and understand if this is real or all made up by the artist. I will be going back to try and get my head around it all again sometime soon. I like the look of the Symposium:"Freud in Blackpool" on the 2nd of November and will most likely go to that to get more answers!
I'm really not an art critic, I'm very much a kind of 'does it look pretty' art appreciator. However, I can very much appreciate something like this that has me thinking about it days later. Something that evokes thoughts of 'WTF have I just looked at' without me dismissing it as a load of rubbish.
This show did that to me. I have a bucket load of pictures I would love to share, but to be honest I think everyone should go and see for themselves. I have chosen a select few that I want to write about because they stood out to me and my psyche.
I love the idea of a Freudian dreamland funfair. Below is a picture of the artists 3D representation of the park "based" on Albert Grass's sketches.
Some of my favorite things in this show were the videos which were recreations of dreams that the group members of the Amateur Psychoanalytic Society made. Some were really sad, some had me in hysterics, others had me questioning why I was inflicting this kind of confusion
on myself!
Below are pictures from two different films, the first two are from a video that had me really intrigued. You will find throughout this that I am bit obsessed with the sex side of this exhibition, like I said its the bits that stood out to my psyche and my psyche likes sex. I think in this video the person had a dream that explored sexuality, questioning and exploring their potential bisexual nature, the video was really very interesting to watch.
This picture from another video had me in hysterics, I wasn't actually able to pay attention to the whole thing as there were several films playing on multiple screens and I kept getting distracted between them all, but the screen shot below piqued my interested as, I don't know if you are all aware of this, but I am a little bit obsessed with hair.
The idea that the person is worried that the fairer sex might be repelled by his body hair made me laugh so much, I can't imagine ever being repelled by a person, man or woman with body hair. It is something, however, that I am starting to explore within my own work why some hair is attractive and other hair isn't.
I didn't appreciate the deck chairs, I decided the floor would be a more comfortable platform to view the films.
Below is meant to be a visual concept of the ego, super - ego and ID. I don't know much about the theories of Freud and so I think this was lost on me, I like how it made me look though. Even when I'm super squat and wide I'm a sexy bitch, oh yeah. I wonder what Freud would make of that.
Another part of the exhibition was a series of illustrations of dreams. Obviously they contained a lot of sexual references and obviously they're going to be the ones I choose to show.
I really liked the first one below, the woman saying "come play with me" is me on most days when I have to do work that I don't want to do, and I so often and easily get lost in day dreams and allow myself to get distracted with play.
The series of illustrations are not what I would usually appreciate but I think they work in the context of these dream illustrations, to have anything more ornate or graceful wouldn't look right, these are not dreams of fantasy they are moments of horrifying embarrassment, shame, humiliation, confusion and impotence.
Well that's what I got from it anyway. I recommend this exhibition, I'm sure many will have a completely different experience to me but I thought I'd share my conclusions and feelings on it.
