Animal Dreams: A Constellation
Gibson St Gallery, Pablo Center, Eau Claire WI
Artist Reception Friday, August 9 5-7 PM
Gallery hours 10-2
and
1 hour before performance
"Animal Dreams: A Constellation”
Artist Statement by Joe Maurer
“Permitting fantasy in myself had the same effect as would be produced on a man if he came into his workshop and found all his tools flying independently doing things of his will” - Carl G. Jung, The Red Book
Like Jung, prior to starting the Animal Dreams project a year ago, I had been adverse to fantasy in my work. Something about relying on fantasy in landscape painting felt false or anti-intellectual. So I asked myself - what if by embracing fantasy and instincts I evolved my imagery? This new attitude required an openness to embrace internal and external visions as equals. I thought of a constellation - a path made mentally connecting the stars. The ‘stars’ in my case would be actual places in the land, local farms which steward the land. Animals symbolically would represent different constellations of self.
The process began with charcoal drawing, eyes closed, and letting feeling shape what I saw. As the drawings evolved, they were photographed frame by frame to make an animation. In one instance, the marks made by my hands would circle and become a meeting of a pair of otters. In another, a pig is visited in dreamland by an elephant expressing feelings of fear, grief and longing. Petroglyphs would come alive in a coyote den not only as symbols of the past but as guides to a world which has not yet become. (After drawing the coyote sequence, in an actual dream of my own, a coyote appeared from the grip of an octopus.) Around 3000 drawings later I had a series of dreams.
At the same time I was engaging fantasy in the studio I visited a handful of farms in Wisconsin once every two weeks and attempted to paint en plein air, my external vision of place. I wanted the paintings to show the ephemeral nature of weather which behaves like a dream would. The landscape image-making process started by looking backward. Firstly working in collage on newspapers from as early as the 19th century, I used a technique to preserve the newspapers in wax. I would then paint on top of the newsprint. This to preserved the tension of opposites - between the past and present, figure and ground. The intermingling of contemporary rural landscape imagery in paint, wax and newsprint created a palimpsest - a partially an obscured reality. In this way, mythical landscape spaces allowed the past and present to interact and speak to each other.
The final component of the exhibit was to create paintings of actual places I visited and superimpose dreams into said places. The paintings were made quickly with the vocabulary I developed when making charcoal drawings and landscape paintings.
Nobody can say for certain where creativity comes from. Evolution could be said to be between form and circumstance - it requires trusting an idea which is not fully formed. I view evolution as not something stuck in the past but as something we can play with and share with the world. I hope the work in Animal Dreams inspires others to do the same.
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Paintings: Oil, Wax and Ephemera on wood
“Fall at Smit Family Farm” $1400
“Winter at Square Root Farm” $1400
“Winter at Cedar Bee Farm” $1200
“Winter at Sedgewood Farm” $1200
“Spring qt Sunbow Farm” $1500
“Summer at Genesis Acres” $1400
Murals: Acrylic on upcycled billboard
“ Borderland on the Shores of Lake Superior” $5000
“Cedar Stand Full of Owls” (unfinished) $4000
“Dream of the City Rabbit” (Assisted by Jesse Blake Hey) $6000
Video:
“Animal Dreams”
Drawing, animating, editing and sound effects by Joe Maurer
Music by Jeremy Ylvisaker
Thank you to Farmers Chris and Helen Kees, Mary and Bruce Anderson, Ashley Steinke, Jake Lau, Adam Wehling, Kristina Buening, Soma and Noah Smit
Special thank you to Bob A-Z and Deirdre Anne Jenkins
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