DREAM CUM TRUE

A solo exhibition of my new work, DREAM CUM TRUE, just opened in Seoul. The actual title of the entire solo exhibition, ILLUMINATIONS, reflects my focus this year on prophetic illumination as the trigger for new creative processing.

DREAM CUM TRUE is an electronic meditation that charts the relationship between rhythmic oceanic waves, the movement of the tides, variable trade wind patterns, and the creative process. It involves meditating on the beach, walking along the shore, recording the sounds of the beach culture, investigating deep trance states during the long summer solstice, and even composing improvisational texts during the total lunar eclipse. The images in the Seoul exhibition are experimentally shot mobile phone video captures of famous beach landscape paintings.

Now that it is finished, I can see how DREAM CUM TRUE attempts to integrate the cumulative effects of all of these elements as they provide necessary input into the construction of my daily poetic musings. It also blends these musings with both my own evolving poetic breath (a personal sense of measure) and the rhythmic rituals of the natural landscape I conduct them in. This blend of poetic mindfulness conspires with nature's own rhythm to further stimulate mild hallucinations in my field of vision while reaching new clarity during long stretches of meditation on the horizon. I say "meditation on the horizon" because it's the horizon that I was meditatating on while musing the work that then became DREAM CUM TRUE.

If it's true that mind is shapely and ones spontaneous poetic thoughts form to this shapeliness, then DREAM CUM TRUE feels like a work of art that taps into the unconscious connections between the moon, the tides, the ocean, and the nervous rhythms of the body as it succumbs to the creative impulse. This work has been described as very hypnotic and peaceful even as the texts are at times jarring and full of double entendre (something that seems to inFlect all of my work). The length of the looping video is approximately 85 minutes.

The ILLUMINATIONS exhibition is sponsored by the Janet Oh Gallery but takes place inside the luxury designed W Seoul hotel in an area of the city called Walkerhill. This stylish set-up in a public space is an unusual context for my work, but then DREAM CUM TRUE is an unusual work that just happened to fit into the curatorial context. The gallery -- one of Seoul's most interesting spaces that has a very cool bar-cafe on the bottom floor of the gallery where they recently exhibited Nam June Paik's "Good Morning Mr. Orwell" -- mixes new media art with traditional forms and has a curatorial relationship with the W in that it features one of its media artist's work for two months at a time. The hotel has both large and small plasma screens as well as projections throughout the ground floor of the hotel and as such the exhibition consists of five separate video works that are distributed throughout the environment.

For some background on my recent connection to Seoul, the relationship between new media and Buddhism, and the indie film scene that I am attracted to and hope to converge with in the near future, go here and here.

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Metadata: DREAM CUM TRUE, art, Mark Amerika, avant-garde, exhibition, new media, Seoul, W Hotel