The Los Angeles Post

AS IF IN A DREAM: HISTORY, FANTASY, FUTURE OPENS AT SBMA MARCH 8 AN EXPLORATION OF HOW ARTISTS MERGE MEMORY WITH IMAGINATION

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SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is pleased to announce As if in a Dream: History, Fantasy, Future, an exhibition where landscapes and portraits rooted in personal associations and uncanny figures show how fleeting experiences can be transformed into inventive new worlds. As if in a Dream features works by Alice Baber, Dominic Chambers, Edward Chavez, Rafael Coronel, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Marsden Hartley, Mimi Lauter, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Jorge Pardo, Patricia Peco, Lari Pitman, Odilon Redon, Max Hooper Schneider, Brenna Youngblood, and others.
abstract painting with vibrant colors seemingly falling away from the viewer set against a gray wall
Alice Baber, Wheel of Day, 1971. Oil on canvas. SBMA, Gift of the Artist to the Ala Story Collection. © Alice Baber.
 
The artworks in this exhibition started from a kernel of reality, a glimmer of lived experience, or a sliver of memory. Like dreams, they combine real and familiar elements but in unrecognizable, illogical, or uncanny ways. They show artists giving fleeting memories a durable form, envisioning a future, and transforming the everyday into the visionary.
Spread across the McCormick and Davidson Galleries, the exhibition features recent acquisitions and works from the Museum’s permanent collection, supplemented by loans. The presentation is divided into two sections: landscapes and bodies (mostly human).
The landscape section often uses the environment as a portal to the past and the artist’s deep associations with places. Edward Chavez described himself as “an American painter with a Mexican heritage and a desire to explore that heritage.” In Elemental Landscape (1956), he seems to show the geological formations of New Mexico and Colorado, where he spent his childhood in a family of migrant farm workers.
Similarly, Alice Baber’s Wheel of Day (1971) epitomizes her striving to recreate on canvas what she called “color memories.” Her strongest childhood recollections were color-based, and this painting has the feel of a sunny, out-of-focus landscape made from the jumbled kaleidoscope of recollections.