ARTISTS
I woke up dreaming. 16th A.I.R. Biennial
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce its 16th Biennial, I woke up dreaming., curated by Patricia Margarita Hern谩ndez. Beginning with the democratic exercise of an open call, the exhibition asks artists to reflect on the nebulous boundary between performance and daily life in the hallucinatory media landscape that defines our present moment.
Borrowing its title from a 1978 song by Lydia Lunch鈥檚 band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, I woke up dreaming. uses the dream state as a metaphor for exploring the disorientation many of us feel as we find ourselves caught between digital entanglements and analogue experiences, between moments of authentic connection and curated self-presentation. Each artist in the exhibition engages with dreaming鈥攏ot necessarily as a literal act, but as a process of envisioning, questioning, and reshaping reality. The familiar becomes unsettling, the mundane is illuminated with strange light, and the boundaries of possibility are stretched. To dream is to experience emotions in their most exaggerated and raw forms. The works on view reflect this emotional landscape, invoking a sense of the weird, the eerie, and the unexpectedly sublime.
The exhibition brings together works by seventeen artists working across a diverse array of mediums, including video, sculpture, performance, painting, and printmaking. Installed alongside works solicited from the open call process are two archival films by Vivienne Dick and Miranda July, which serve as a sort of spectral interlocutor for the exhibition鈥檚 more contemporary moments. For each artist in I woke up dreaming., the dream state is a liminal space where conventional binaries鈥攂etween natural and artificial intelligence, humanity and its environment, past and present, or margin and periphery鈥攃an be called into question. Through dreams, they probe how bodies have been mechanized and upturn the disciplinary structures that enforce control in our waking lives. They embrace the absurdity of the everyday, exult in failure, and reconfigure despair into hope, mirroring the regenerative arc of a dream that first unsettles, and then heals.
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A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce its 16th Biennial, I woke up dreaming., curated by Patricia Margarita Hern谩ndez. Beginning with the democratic exercise of an open call, the exhibition asks artists to reflect on the nebulous boundary between performance and daily life in the hallucinatory media landscape that defines our present moment.
Borrowing its title from a 1978 song by Lydia Lunch鈥檚 band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, I woke up dreaming. uses the dream state as a metaphor for exploring the disorientation many of us feel as we find ourselves caught between digital entanglements and analogue experiences, between moments of authentic connection and curated self-presentation. Each artist in the exhibition engages with dreaming鈥攏ot necessarily as a literal act, but as a process of envisioning, questioning, and reshaping reality. The familiar becomes unsettling, the mundane is illuminated with strange light, and the boundaries of possibility are stretched. To dream is to experience emotions in their most exaggerated and raw forms. The works on view reflect this emotional landscape, invoking a sense of the weird, the eerie, and the unexpectedly sublime.
The exhibition brings together works by seventeen artists working across a diverse array of mediums, including video, sculpture, performance, painting, and printmaking. Installed alongside works solicited from the open call process are two archival films by Vivienne Dick and Miranda July, which serve as a sort of spectral interlocutor for the exhibition鈥檚 more contemporary moments. For each artist in I woke up dreaming., the dream state is a liminal space where conventional binaries鈥攂etween natural and artificial intelligence, humanity and its environment, past and present, or margin and periphery鈥攃an be called into question. Through dreams, they probe how bodies have been mechanized and upturn the disciplinary structures that enforce control in our waking lives. They embrace the absurdity of the everyday, exult in failure, and reconfigure despair into hope, mirroring the regenerative arc of a dream that first unsettles, and then heals.
