"Dreamer" :: Amanda Albanese

We recently spoke to artist Amanda Albanese about her piece "Dreamer". She dissects the imagery within this oil painting, the intentions behind its meanings and the use of photographic imagery in her artwork.

"Dreamer came into being as part of a series ‘Artifacts of the Imaginary’ which was a collection of paintings based on the meeting of found imagery, fragmented thoughts, and interpretive dream states. It was an attempt to create a pictorial reality, which simultaneously conveyed a sense of ambiguity and lucidity in being lost and found in one's own personal history and present state.

The child was used as an archetype of sorts, as one who indiscriminately interacts with objects as part of a developmental schema-- and the objects which are designed to manipulate that experience in order to gain capital from it. By acting on a motivational set whose agenda lies hidden not in the objects itself, but in the system which promulgates it, the object becomes torn between the thing by which one learns from and the system which constitutes it. For the individual, the dichotomy takes form when one realizes that as a product of this conflict, memory and reality are inevitably affected by it--whereby all experience from which ones instincts are derived--become suspect as an agent against oneself.

This painting attempts to recollect the threat on impeding outside entities into ones personal space, ones sometimes guised as objects of beauty, and feelings of home.

The use of photographs has become a point of departure for its ability to exist in itself as an object and pictorial as we perceive it. The photograph becomes both a historical artifact as well as a post production recording of memory. The tonal qualities of the paint are sometime nostalgic--indicative of a vague suspension encountered when trying to use the past as a means to guide the future."

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