Dreams of Here

Art Review: Dreams of Here at Brighton Museum

Work by Julian Bell, Tom Hammick and Andrzej Jackowski

I recently went to an art exhibition in Brighton and here I saw the everyday create the uncanny before my eyes.

As you walk through the three joining rooms, separating each artist's work, you pass through different levels of consciousness, where reality slides into dreams.

The exhibition begins in the explosively colourful and bright white space which belongs to the work of Julian Bell. His pieces are large, evoking seemingly mundane scenes but the oil painted canvases jump out at you. The everyday objects range from the soft, subdued warm pinks and blues of 'Rain': colours reflecting the peaceful, romantic fall of rain against a bedroom window. To 'Darvaza' which captures in vivid detail an erupting volcano, the brightness giving movement and life to the whole room.

The second room contains the artwork of Tom Hammick. After leaving the solid reality, bold colours and physicality of Bell's work; this tentatively lit, all encompassing dark blue space, invites an insight into Hammick's dreaming mind. The subject is real objects; people, trees or nature but these everyday depictions are morphed by the mind. There is an unearthly, uncanny serenity that binds these pieces: you feel you are seeing the world through dreaming eyes. Speaking of his work Hammick said: 'painting distils time;' sentiments which are palpable in his work. You feel you are catching snippets of memories, fragments of time frozen but in a random order: much like a dream.

Lastly you enter a light pink room, exhibiting Andrzej Jackowski's collection: 'The voyage, a still film.' These pieces are more surreal and unnerving than the previous; we have moved away from the real or the dream and are now deeper into the mind. This room grabs me the most but in a creeping, inconspicuous way. In Jackowski's words: 'this is a place of memory, of thinking.' The collection of 60 drawings are linked by the ‘Baltic brown‘, bloody red and common recurring objects: such as the heron’s head, ladders, and hanging figures. The heron’s head is a menacing, watchful figure, unknown and voyeuristic. Themes of violence and sex course though the drawings, suspending you (like many of the figures) in this haunted world. The uncanny is a haunting of the everyday, a fissure in our seemingly substantial reality.

I left the exhibition in a pensive daze, knocked out by the stunning vivacity of Bell's work, hypnotised by the beautiful blue dreams Hammick paints and unnerved but engrossed from Jackowski's creations.