Do we dream in collage?

I ask, because virtually all entries in Feature Creep’s latest collection “The Dream Museum” tackle the theme through a medium of stuff on stuff on stuff.

Still image or moving, computer generated or hand forged, we are treated to an assortment of surreal tapestries, using disparate images, textures, and sources embedded and juxtaposed on one plane or through many.

If we do dream in collage, I see this is a progression from a theory of mine that we see in montage.

From that thought, the montage of the overlapping images of sight, reflection, memory, and thought coalesce in the psyche and bloom into the mouldy fermentation of dreams once our eyes hit their pelotons.

I’ve long hated dreams. I can’t remember which meme or tv show phrased it this way, but I resonated deeply with the sentiment that dreams are like being “felt up by our subconscious”.

There’s a maligned aftertaste when you wake from a dream (regardless of whether it was a “nightmare”) and are left completely at a loss for the dubious logic, physics, and deluded representations within it.

Locations play the stage of places they’re not. People you know intimately are either cast in the roles of people you do not recognize, or unrecognisable faces play the roles of your loved ones. And while held hostage in this unconscious theatre, you assume these falsehoods to be fact (for the moment), even though there’s a nagging feeling that something is just…off. And then you wake up and realise, it’s you. You’re off. The bed. Get up.

A lot of, if not all of, the work from The Dream Museum leaves me with this “off” feeling. The benefit of having it presented in the context of an art show is there’s an assumed preparedness, and sense of agency for how you’re about to bathe your retinas in the wading pools of surreality.

BILE SISTER’s “Generation Stream” is an absolute fever dream; a delirious “music video”, or hypnotic torture tactic, where floating Furbies (the cursed bird-like children’s toy from the 90s) chastise us with 21st century working-class anxieties over what could pass as Le Tigre-style indie dance-punk. Furby-faced floating chicken breasts join part way as we’re berated with the phrase “Nine to five! Nine to five!” before shifting to acid-tinged reggae, the silhouettes of our Furby captors melting into kaleidoscope green screen background aesthetics.

Shaugn Martel’s “R_U_O_K?” almost harkens the cubist aspiration to capture a moment from every angle; a digital collage of fragmented images, a “never ending hallway” set “in a place between places. Liminal and empty.” Starting as a simple video POV looking upon a desk, the camera shifts and we are thrust into a void beckoning us to the vanishing point of digital detritus and the floating pixelated strata of dismembered mp4s.

Akin to this post-internet Rorschach is Danielle Goshay’s “Rebis”, a series of “photographs” wherein abstract silhouettes are scarred and neutered by the application of flame. Perhaps it’s an innate human vanity to interpret these figures anthropomorphically. Perhaps it’s just me.

In a reverse anthropomorphism, Kelsey Ford’s nightmare fuel “Morphology” seamlessly collages black and white screen printed portraits of old Hollywood starlets and insect features, inspiring a primal disgust in me of which I’ll never recover. Did I mention I hate dreams?

In Shanhuan Manton’s short film “Lucid”, we’re given the first work that hints at the possibility to control “dreams” rather than merely succumb to and retroactively interpret them. This control is illustrated as a capitalist venture to “extract” paraphernalia from dreams (in this case the protagonist seems to be trying to synthesize the connection of a now lost love). This proposition does confirm the hellish understanding that in the capitalist zeal to monetize everything, mining dreams for commodity should not come as a surprise.

Personally I’d rather forgo dreams altogether, but my fondness for surrealism in art might be remiss to cast aside the necessary symbiosis of sleep induced hallucination for the sake of art.

However, I may be glad I haven’t been the recipient of any of these dreams in particular. Just merely a distanced observer of someone else’s.