A Space for Dreamers: An Interview with Duncan Alexander Cameron Stewart
Toronto, Aug. 2014: “The daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” –Gaston Bachelard
The tipping point between the limitless and the limited is well traversed. A common steadiness has been found in speaking of the two types of spaces at once, though they are indeed opposed to one another with regards to the dream: the two exist synonymously for the dreamer. But in using the metaphor of immense space to describe intimate experience, now the exact opposite image occurs at the thought of boundlessness—we have been trained, almost by design, to expect a very structured, personal, and limited experience in the face of vastness. How often is the infinite used as a vehicle to examine a personal poetic experience? The universe. The sea. Just as “literally” is now also defined as “figuratively,” through the translation (or transliteration) of one space in relation to the other, the endless is also the finite. While the double register exists, this shift does not automatically denote the sublime; this is a structural, ontological, and completely secular vision of interminable space. The daydreamer, once described as elsewhere, is now inextricably linked to the material present. Visions and dreams abound, but the dreamer cannot lose sight of its source: the physical, quantifiable, and permanent body that elicits its variable mirages and exists in both states as one.
I spoke with Toronto-based artist Duncan Alexander Cameron Stewart about his exhibition A Room Dreaming of a Lake, currently on view at xpace. As the title infers, the installation examines the boundary of the body-brain dilemma described above. Stewart treats the trope of large bodies of water in the history of art—once a marker for transcendence—in post-modern fashion. Appropriated and recycled as an image (not a container), the landscape of the sea (and subsequent expanses of water) is transformed into a symbol of itself. The simulacrum of sea is a common material. But one could just as easily say that history is not enough—that there can be younger dreams, younger visions of the sea or the lake, cropping up like sprouts in a thick forest populated by time. All of it belongs to fiction.
This non-Romantic yet still tender sign has an immediacy that is quite unmatched. Stewart accredits his representation of the sea, a cropped image of water that neatly meets the edges of the page, to Michael Snow’s structural film Wavelength (1967). In our conversation below we touch on the source, the ever-familiar tension between interior and exterior spaces, and methods of inserting the subjective—and, further, the sentimental—into a history of structural film, an impossibly “objective” practice.
A Space for Dreamers: An Interview with Duncan Alexander Cameron Stewart
Toronto, Aug. 2014: “The daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” –Gaston Bachelard
The tipping point between the limitless and the limited is well traversed. A common steadiness has been found in speaking of the two types of spaces at once, though they are indeed opposed to one another with regards to the dream: the two exist synonymously for the dreamer. But in using the metaphor of immense space to describe intimate experience, now the exact opposite image occurs at the thought of boundlessness—we have been trained, almost by design, to expect a very structured, personal, and limited experience in the face of vastness. How often is the infinite used as a vehicle to examine a personal poetic experience? The universe. The sea. Just as “literally” is now also defined as “figuratively,” through the translation (or transliteration) of one space in relation to the other, the endless is also the finite. While the double register exists, this shift does not automatically denote the sublime; this is a structural, ontological, and completely secular vision of interminable space. The daydreamer, once described as elsewhere, is now inextricably linked to the material present. Visions and dreams abound, but the dreamer cannot lose sight of its source: the physical, quantifiable, and permanent body that elicits its variable mirages and exists in both states as one.
I spoke with Toronto-based artist Duncan Alexander Cameron Stewart about his exhibition A Room Dreaming of a Lake, currently on view at xpace. As the title infers, the installation examines the boundary of the body-brain dilemma described above. Stewart treats the trope of large bodies of water in the history of art—once a marker for transcendence—in post-modern fashion. Appropriated and recycled as an image (not a container), the landscape of the sea (and subsequent expanses of water) is transformed into a symbol of itself. The simulacrum of sea is a common material. But one could just as easily say that history is not enough—that there can be younger dreams, younger visions of the sea or the lake, cropping up like sprouts in a thick forest populated by time. All of it belongs to fiction.
This non-Romantic yet still tender sign has an immediacy that is quite unmatched. Stewart accredits his representation of the sea, a cropped image of water that neatly meets the edges of the page, to Michael Snow’s structural film Wavelength (1967). In our conversation below we touch on the source, the ever-familiar tension between interior and exterior spaces, and methods of inserting the subjective—and, further, the sentimental—into a history of structural film, an impossibly “objective” practice.
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