Diane Fenster: Your Dreams and Omens Revealed
Artist(s):
Title:
- Your Dreams and Omens Revealed
Exhibition:
Creation Year:
- 2003
Category:
Keywords:
Artist Statement:
Humans have always attempted to pull back the veils obscuring the future. We peek inside the soothsayer’s parlor and gaze through the curtains that hide the cards on the table. The patterns of our future shimmer as predictions of events that will either ravage or embrace our lives. These are the cards we draw when we pick up the deck. No card is alike. No deck the same. Yet because we share the same chance of the draw, we are bound together, suspended in the picture albums of all the worlds.
During the early 20th century, dream books became very popular. These books, produced to advertise patent medicine, were odd compendiums of dream images, superstitions, and omens along with their symbolic meanings. Gathered from both historical custom and tradition, as well as individual insight and interpretation, they were used to forecast and predict the future, as well as understand the past. Seen as primitive lists and summaries, and sophisticated presentations of Jungian-like dictionaries of symbolic objects and ideas, the dreams and omens were seen to reflect and represent (symbolically) our life and its place in the cosmos.
Drawing on inspiration from my collection of early dream books, I used both digital and traditional photographic techniques to produce Dreams and Omens as 20-inch-by-24-inch Polaroid image transfers printed onto fabric.
