Opening Reception Thursday 10 April, 6-8pm • Artists: Jonathas de Andrade, Edgardo Aragon, Gavin Murphy, Lisa Tan

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream, curated by Paula Naughton and featuring work by Jonathas de Andrade, Edgardo Aragón, Gavin Murphy and Lisa Tan. The exhibition brings together artists who revisit history through personal and staged narratives. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, real and imagined, each artist creates a palimpsest site to negotiate new meaning. Existing in neither the past or present this in-between space uncovers alternate ‘truths’. Through shared processes of documentation and archiving, the artists address culture as a form of representation in order to examine complex issues of social & political structures.

Themes of historical amnesia are explored in the work of Jonathas de Andrade. Filmed on the streets of Buenes Aires, Andrade captured the faces of 4000 anonymous men on Super 8 black and white film. Transferred onto video the images are montaged together at an aggressive speed, the faces blurring into one. Titled 4000 Disparos(translated into English as 4000 shots), refers to desaparecidos, a term used to describe the disappeared during the Argentinean dictatorship of 1970’s. Through the mechanism of the lens, the work resurrects the emotions historicized in the past.

Collective and personal memory are interconnected in the work of Edgardo Aragón. In a video titled, La Encomienda, Aragon resists the exploitation of his native Oaxaca region in Mexico by foreign mining companies. A choir of young men perform a composition of mining protest slogans from different Latin American countries. Sung in a Baroque style, slogans such as ‘This is our land, mining companies be damned!’ – confront the viewer as they sing into the mouth of an abandoned mine shaft. The staging of the chorus creates a metaphor for the collective voice of the region.

Gavin Murphy uses extensive cultural material sifted from art, history, theory and literature to form temporal and constructed narratives. Often using cinematic tropes and the mise-en-scène, his practice involves the assemblage of unique fabricated elements. Combining the fictive and the factual his practice creates analogies as a means to interrogate time and commemorate cultural memory. Murphy is developing a large-scale text intervention in the exhibition space as well as an accompanying sculptural wall work.

Lisa Tan exhibits National Geographic, a double slide projection installation. Culled from the artist’s late father’s collection of National Geographic magazines from the 1970’s and 80’s, romantic images of mountains are displayed. Twined with abstract images of the reverse of the magazine pages, the synchronised images evoke our shared perception of topography. As well as pointing to these broader universal interpretations, Tan subtly reveals a personal reading indicated through an accompanying exhibition text. Through the apparatus of archival structures Tan weaves ambiguous journeys of association.

The exhibition title, The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream. is a quote by the writer and poet, Jorge Luís Borges.