30 March – 10 April 2022

ELECTRIC DREAMS

David Cooper, Louis Grant, Emma-Kate Hart, Annelies Jahn, Jacqueline Knight,
Harriet Schwarzrock, Owen Leong, Sarah Edmondson and Madisyn Zabel.
Curated by NOT.

Opening night: Wednesday 30th March, 6 – 8 pm

Finissage: Saturday 9th April, 2 – 4 pm

Catalogue & Price List: View PDF Catalogue (4.4 Mb)

‘What’s a dream?’ the sentient PC Edgar asks his lovelorn owner Miles in the 1984 sci-fi rom-com Electric Dreams. ‘A dream,’ replies Miles, ‘is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep.’

Like dreams, Georges Claude’s electrified glass tubes filled with gaseous neon are ubiquitous night-time signifiers of our unconscious desires. They’re here but not here. Yet just as LEDs are fast replacing such iconic sites as Sydney’s Coca-Cola sign and Shinjuku’s giant billboards, a new group of artists are resurrecting Claude’s old technology to connect us once again with modern impulses and subliminal yearnings but this time through sculptural form not text. 

Curated by the artist NOT, Electric Dreams brings together the work of David Cooper, Louis Grant, Emma-Kate Hart, Annelies Jahn, Jacqueline Knight, Harriet Schwarzrock, Owen Leong, Sarah Edmondson and Madisyn Zabel – artists who share NOT’s vision of neon as an expressive three-dimensional medium, not a sign.

Running concurrently in Saint Cloche’s upstairs project space, eight of NOT’s fellow artists at Sydney’s Square One Studios in Alexandria respond to the hyperconnectivity of Electric Dreams with a show pulsing with colour and transmitting inner light, including new painting and sculpture by Jacqueline Butterworth, Lisa Carrett, Lada Dedić, Amy Dynan, Katrina Hill, Julia Meyerowitz-Katz, Carl Milton and Ralph Stanton.

Square One Studios Catalogue & Price List: View PDF Catalogue (3 Mb)

NOT is an installation artist working primarily in ceramic and glass. He has held solo shows at Kronenberg Mais Wright, and has been included in group exhibitions at Canberra Glassworks, Casula Powerhouse, Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Shepparton Art Museum, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Toyama Glass Art Museum and Wollongong Art Gallery. As a curator, he has previously presented ‘S-MILE’ (2016), ‘Sgraffito’ and ‘Layered’ (both 2018) for Saint Cloche, and ‘The White Room’ (2017) and ‘séance’ (2020) for Stanley Street Gallery.