Dream      Dream 157,000

Dreamer     Crystal Gandrud

This Will Really Help Him

An installation is being set up in a large gallery. People mill about outside, waiting for it to be ready.

I have been asked to test the installation. I enter the white cavernous room with a very high ceiling, sit on the cement floor and wait for the show or experience to begin.

For a moment nothing happens. Then, something shifts. At first, it seems to be thunder. Then a wave of pixelated water, digitally produced, washes down in front of me. My eyeballs—which feel separately aware from my mind—determine that it is not actual water. Although it falls in a torrent, I am able to perceive every tiny moment as if it were happening slowly.

The second after I register that I am able to do this, it turns to real water and slams down onto me. I know that if I can stay conscious as this is happening it will be an awakening or at the very least, a moment of knowing the true nature of awareness. My utter joy as I stay present and aware for that one millisecond before and as it slams into me is perfectly pure and complete.

Then, I merge with the water and the obliteration. There is no directed or central self. I am complete awakeness or deadness. I do not exist. It is bliss.

At the precise moment the water slams into me I think, “This will really help him.”

After the test, I leave the installation and walk down the hallway behind two people I recognize. It takes me a minute to understand that it is Reggie Ray and Emily Bower, softly chatting. They enter a small, shitty kitchen and discuss something they do not want me to hear over a filthy drip coffee maker from the 80s. They wear blue and white striped shirts and ill-fitting khaki pants.

They know that I am there but pretend I’m not in the hopes that I will go away. They do not want me to hear whatever it is they are discussing.

Home

Dream of the Drawing for Everything alchemies dream-like things: images and texts and films and sketches and philosophy and half-thoughts and visions and moments and fragments of all kinds. Resting and exploring here may deepen your relationship with the oneiric and, therefore, all apparent reality. Resting and exploring here may augment your psyche’s healing tendency—as Jung called it—through highlighting and delighting in humanity’s hallucinatory creations. (Without them, after all, neurologists assure us we would go starkers.) It is time there was a potentially infinite, intimate museum to what cannot be seen. Welcome to the museum.

Dream of the Drawing for Everything is some of the collaboration between artist Nuala Clarke & writer Crystal Gandrud. Our work arises out of what dances on the edges of perception and our collective attention gravitates to the dream-like nature of human experience. We have been in collaboration since 2010. Our merged practices of visual and textual art unfold on a continuum, as part of an interconnected series evolving over time. Both performed “Fair Shouldered One” (a book which is not a book) at the &Now Literary Festival in Paris, 2012 and installed “Between Spaces”, a Yeats inspired dreamscape at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, 2013. Most recently participated in the Find Arts Project in Castlebar, Ireland. Our public art installation of words and images printed on linen, “Woven Found”, hung on Castle Street. The project won the best commissioning practice award from Allianz Business to Arts, 2014.

Nuala Clarke

Nuala Clarke, visual artist, lives and works between Co. Mayo and New York City. Educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she moved to New York City in 1993. In September 2007, she received a fellowship to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo and began returning to Ireland from NY to work every year. Clarke has been represented by Boltax Gallery, NY since 2005. Recent shows include, Amid a Space Between: Irish Artists in America at the SFMoMa Artists Gallery, San Francisco, (2012); to Tremble into Stillness, a WB Yeats related show at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; RHA invited artist; and A drawing for Everything, Ballinglen Arts Foundation (2013). BLINK, a public art installation at the Westport Arts Festival, Co. Mayo (2014). Upcoming shows (2015): Impressions of Yeats, Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; Of this place, Sligo and Madrid.

nualaclarke@gmail.com

Crystal Gandrud

Crystal Gandrud, writer, lives in New York City and Normandy, France. She holds an MFA, Creative Writing and a BFA, Classical Theatre. Recent publications include “Yeatsian: Numberless Dreamers,” The Encyclopedia Project, 2014, “Here,” Lost Magazine, and “Idiom: Woodbird Flies Early,” The Encyclopedia Project. Her dissertation, “Murdoch: the Mandala Maker,” was presented at Kingston University’s Iris Murdoch Conference (2006), London. At the most recent Murdoch Conference, she performed a multi-media excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled “The Forgotten Man,” inspired by Murdoch’s philosophical writings. She is under contract for a memoire entitled “Astonishment: A Litany of the Uncanny.”

gandrud@actuallyorange.com

Tell us your dreams. Dreams are accepted by the editorial staff on the basis of aesthetics. That said, there are certain topics that will not be considered. Extremely violent or pornographic dreams will not be accepted on any basis so please do not submit them.

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