Введение Dream Merchant

12 September - 25 October 2015



Dream Merchant takes the legacy of Norman Lindsay into a new domain: the streets and suburbs of Springwood, Parramatta, Emu Plains and Penrith. Aiming to recreate the intensity of a Norman Lindsay etching or painting the artists have carried this flamboyance to a more unusual backdrop - the Australian bush and suburbs.

Lindsay’s historial figures attempted to envelop and emphasise their environment, using it as a dramatic background for the play of their supplanting theatrics. The artists of Dream Merchant borrow his signifiers and theatrics to mimic an impossible dream.


The Dream Merchant exhibition is a re-working of the original Dream Merchant exhibition produced and exhibited at Blacktown Arts Centre from 7 November 2008 to 31 January 2009.


Full Artists' Statement

An Impossible Dream

Mimicry is at once both resemblance and menace. (Homi Bhabi, Of Mimicry and Man)

Mimicry repels the past with its attempt to adapt and succeed it.

In Dream Merchant we have taken an early Australian artist, Norman Lindsay, into a new domain: the streets and suburbs of Springwood, Parramatta, Emu Plains and Penrith. Aiming to recreate the intensity of a Norman Lindsay etching or painting and taking into consideration the theatricality of his works and the vivid portrayal of emotion and sexuality, we have carried this flamboyance to a more unusual backdrop – the Australian bush and suburbs. The everyday of contemporary capitalism creates its own mechanisms of subjective promotion of which fantasy seems to be an escape
from the occasional and random violence of reality. A violence and reality not disconnected from the history of which it is born. The suburban dislocation growing out of development of this past.

Colonialism is at once a field and a focused entity. Its historical spread created a network of literacy and visual narratives. The development of the Australian settlement included a culture that served the purpose of the colonisers. Often envisioning the Australian landscape as one that was in the process of being tamed. Of being formed into quiet settled picturesque places of culture and domesticity, or in the awesome realm of the creator’s sublimity. The artwork of Norman Lindsay seems to sit outside of this endeavour and yet his characters maintain a separation from the landscape and as such he must rest firmly within the academy of transplanted European artists. His images, costume and drama arise from the dramatic literary creations of Europe and the history and religion of another world. Yet his work is no smooth signifier. Lindsay’s figures attempt to envelop and emphasise their environment, using it as a dramatic background for the play of their supplanting theatrics. We have borrowed his signifiers and theatrics to mimic an impossible dream.

Written by Victoria Lawson, developed in conversation with Liam Benson, Sari T.M. Kivinen and Naomi Oliver.