HalfDream: Another Room
This new site-specific installation engages Doreen Chan’s on-going participatory art project, HalfDream, in which users around the world can connect with their "dreammates."
In her first solo exhibition in the US, Doreen Chan finds in dreams a medium for human connection and a communal language. As the title of her show expresses, for Chan dreams provide another room—“a space that is real for the dreamer, not fake,” in her words, or illusionary.
HalfDream: Another Room (2022) by Doreen ChanMattress Factory
This tangible, psychological realm allows for a better understanding of how individual experiences, memories, major life changes, and daily routines, are shared by others. By working through them, a person’s dreams can impact their perception, altering the course of healing.
An ongoing participatory project, HalfDream, grew out of a body of work that began as a response to Chan’s vivid, rapid dreaming in the context of the political climate in 2019 where the artist grew up in Hong Kong.
HalfDream: Another Room (2022) by Doreen ChanMattress Factory
Chan sets into motion a system for gathering and sharing the ephemeral, idiosyncratic dreams of the collective, transforming them into artwork with the participants, and asking visitors to reflect on their own dreams.
Incorporating an online archive of these dreams with anonymous contributions, Chan pairs the dreams herself. Bringing this archive together with new sculpture and multi-media work, the exhibition situates the viewer between physical and immaterial, personal and collective.
HalfDream: Another Room (2022) by Doreen ChanMattress Factory
In a three-channel video, three dreamers revisit, express, and analyze important relationships, from childhood trauma to potential loss of a friendship. Chan assumes the role of facilitator and mixologist, inviting participants to talk through dream content and associations.
Taken together, the works presented are embedded with stories of humor and grief, family relationships, and the passage of time. These themes have occupied Chan’s practice previously but here shift into deeply considered collaborations with others.
HalfDream: Another Room (2022) by Doreen ChanMattress Factory
Throughout the exhibition, dreams become a common language to communally make sense of social events, everyday phenomena, or tragedy. Through the subtlest interventions, Chan’s installation suggests an evocative laboratory for engaging that which evades, and connects, all of us.
HalfDream: Another Room will be on view through fall 2023. During, Chan will return to Pittsburgh and invite some dreamers to revisit their submissions and create artworks based on their dreams with her in the gallery. To participate, share your dreams on HalfDream.org.
