Since May 26, the Vancouver Art Gallery has been showcasing a phenomenal new exhibition for the summer of 2011. This is easily the most exciting collection assembled by VAG since their seminal 2004 Andy Warhol exhibit. Entitled The Colour of My Dreams, this year’s exhibition is a stunning collection of Surrealist art.For the uninitiated, Surrealism was an aesthetic and philosophical movement that arose in 1920s Paris. French writer André Breton was heavily influenced by the Dadaist belief that excessive rational thought and capitalist bourgeois values had given rise to the First World War. After serving as a military doctor during WWI, Breton and like-minded artists produced writings that, although initially thought as gibberish and nonsense, were actually open-ended and open to interpretation. These were collections of essays published together with like-minded artists in the radical artist journal Litterature. The idea was to create a movement of associated art that rejected what came before it. Breton and his contemporaries called their work “anti-art”.
Use of free association, non-linear thoughts and unusual presentation of ideas was vital to the Surrealist artistic and philosophical conceits. Surrealist art maintained that this presentation of art, heavily reliant on symbolism, imagery and presented in a manner that at first defies logic, is paramount to the aesthetic. The effect is dreamlike, and as such it has its own logic and purpose, one outside of rational thought but open to interpretation. It is no coincidence that Sigmund Freud’s writings, dismissed as obscene just a decade earlier, and the unconscious reflected heavily in the Surrealist movement. It is with these visual arts and writings where much of the Modern Art movement first came to major public attention. Art was, at this point, no longer just pretty pictures and portraits. It is therefore fitting that the exhibition is entitled The Colour of My Dreams.They’re all here on glorious display, and the list of artists whose works are presented is dizzying: Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró, amongst others. Edith Rimmington’s famed The Oneiroscopist, a dazzling Mother Whistler interpretation with a monstrous creature dressed in scuba gear, is the appropriate choice for the exhibit’s publicity materials. Why? Because “oneiroscopist” means “one who interprets dreams”, of course.
