Join us for the opening of “Casting Inside,” a group exhibition featuring the work of Phyllis Bramson, Josh Dihle, and Cathy Hsiao and curated by Matt Morris.

Opening reception Friday, Nov. 17 from 6-9pm

In the dream, I walk across a parking lot and into a brick corridor. Gaps in the masonry permit shafts of light to glint in. The path wraps around the exterior of a building before turning inward. I enter what appears to be some kind of Asian restaurant. The space is mostly darkened, and in puddles of light I see a koi pond, several miniature gardens, and a series of sliding doors through which one dining room proceeds into the next.

“Incorporation denotes a fantasy, introjection a process…That fantasies are often unconscious does not mean they pertain to something outside the subject but rather that they refer to a secretly perpetuated typography…Why are some fantasies directed at the very metaphor of introjection?…Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation mea ns channeling them through language into a communion of empty mouths.”¹

The first room is set up with a long banquet table full of people I recognized. I hear one say, “A paradox is involved here, in that in this initial phase the baby creates the object, but the object is already there, else he would not have created it. The paradox has to be accepted, not resolved.”² I am invited to sit and eat with them, but think better of it. I am trying to find somewhere quiet to make notes about a dream I’d just woken from.

In the second room I pass through, dinner guests read from large, laminated menus, spiral bound and covered with full color photographs of the items available for order. I look down across someone’s shoulder and see a page of the menu that shows paintings for sale: modestly priced, seemingly ink on silk, mostly depicting flowering trees. I wonder where they are stored.

The third room is noisy and crowded. An elaborately carved bar stocked with shelves of bottles takes up nearly half of the space. Many people are inebriated, slurring loudly. I notice some glasses of beer sitting on the floor amidst the feet of those seated and standing; I make sure to avoid knocking them over. I worry that I will forget the details of the dream of which I aimed to make a record. As I make my way to enter a fourth room, the bottom edge of my jeans catch on several shards of broken glass that are sticking up out of the floor. I struggle to free myself.

“But what was this other adventurous self? Certainly the idea of everyone having an imaginative body as well as a physical one seemed likely to be connected in some way with the transfiguration of the object in the light of one’s own dreams…These questions brought me back to thinking more about the phenomena of spreading the imaginative body to take the form of what one looked at. For might not this power to spread around objects of the outer world something that was nevertheless part of oneself, might it not be a way of trying to deal with the primary human predicament of disillusion through separation and jealousy and loss of love?”³

¹Torok, Maria and Nicola Abraham. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print, pp. 125, 128.

²Winnicott, D. W. Home is Where We Start From. New York: W. W> Norton & Company, 1986. Print, p. 30.

³Milner, Marion. On Not Being Able to Paint. New York: International Universities Press, 1957. Print, p. 36, 55.

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Tags: ADDS DONNA, Casting Inside, Cathy Hsiao, Chicago, Humboldt Park, Josh Dihle, Phyllis Bramson