exhibition brochure (PDF) - Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ...

Dru Anderson
Dru Anderson’s elaborate installations of carefully rendered and lovingly detailed
drawings, pastels, oils, and watercolors provide visual environments of seemingly
inexhaustible extension. The artist’s prodigious output (she finishes at
least three works each day and often many more) is driven by a longstanding
and dedicated practice of lucid dreaming. For many years now, she has been
documenting a series of recurring, ever-mutating dreams. While this mode of
working might appear akin to Surrealist experiments in automatism, the intent
and effects of Anderson’s practice depart dramatically from this framework.
While Surrealist artists reached into the realms of slumber hoping to tap into
a transcendent reality—the “sur-” in Surrealism indicating a higher, surpassing
level—Anderson’s works cast back from the world of dreams a universe
of objects more perfect and more vivid than the reality they come to inhabit.
Many of the objects Anderson depicts are taken from a feminine realm of consumer
goods—feathered earrings, stiletto heels, decorative objects associated
with the domestic sphere—which too easily invites the overdetermined language
of gendered description. Fragility, delicacy, wealth of detail, ornament, excess,
precision, naturalistic representation: all of these, too, have been part and parcel
of a simplistic binary logic sequestering women’s art practices from Art proper.
However, feminist art historian Marsha Meskimmon suggests that it is exactly
elaboration, a seminal aspect of Anderson’s practice, that is crucial to overturning
this logic. Elaboration, she notes, “thought through drawing, loses track of
[regulatory] time, unlaces binary stalemates, and suggests contingent forms for
the articulation of sexual difference.” In a more classical, Freudian vein elaboration
also emerges as the most radical aspect of the dreamwork. In Freud’s canonical
The Interpretation of Dreams, secondary elaboration refers to a process that
takes place both in the dream and after waking, in which a “process of expansion
and embellishment of detail” helps manifest latent content. As such, it is
the only element of the dreamwork able to reach into dream and reality alike,
bridging conscious and unconscious thought. Anderson’s intricate installations
offer us both a personal paean to the feminine and the privilege to witness that
most universal of human qualities: the meandering labors of the dreaming mind.
Dru Anderson: Dreamality River, 2013 (detail); mixed-media installation; dimensions variable; courtesy of the artist.