Today's post reviews images from this entry in my dream journal blog Maboroshi no Yume.
My first dream addresses eviction. Just scraping by and barely escaping eviction has been an occasional theme of my life. The fact that I discuss being evicted with my mom also relates to some of my own psychological issues.
However, the idea of eviction also comes from a recent discussion I was a part of with a member of the City Council for my hometown of Denver. The City Council team put together a legal defense fund for low-income people facing eviction. They partially funded the effort out of their own budgets. They are now trying really hard to get the city to get the effort fully funded.
The pink neon space in my second dream definitely comes from an apartment I always see as I'm driving in Denver. There's a ton of neon in this apartment building on the corner of a busy arterial street just east of downtown Denver. It's a real point of curiosity. I don't know who it belongs to. I may try to find out. I will hopefully post a photo of the site soon.
But I think the neon space also comes from the work of Signe Pierce. Signe Pierce did an installation in 2017 called Virtual Normality at the Galerie Nathalie Hagland in Vienna. It's a really good example of her work, and I think it shows the powerful effects it can have on people's imagination.
Here's a link to information on the Virtual Normality installation.
And here's a link to a 2015 PAPER magazine article about Signe Pierce and Ali Coates.
But there's another neon-heavy exhibition I for the life of me can't remember right now. And I really thought it was from 2016 -- where a woman was livestreaming herself from a bed in her installation while people walked through the installation. I felt like it was at a biennial. I may be totally confused about this.
In 2016 and the first part of 2017, neon art was a kind of big part of my life. I was helping an art gallery in Denver get back on its feet. An art collective from New York came through town. Through them I was introduced to a DIY space in Denver. I quite honestly did a horrible job of maintaining my relationship with the NYC group and the Denver DIY group. And my social awkwardness with those two groups just echoed in cacophony through the first part of 2017.
The final big success milestone for the art gallery in Denver that I was helping out, however, was a neon/multimedia show which ended up being a huge hit. But the entire process of making that show happen was also a process, involving a lot of people in the Denver art community, of kind of getting me shoved out the door of the gallery.
The way I got shoved out of Denver's art world is very similar to the way I'm constantly ostracized in the Colorado business world. And it's similar to the way I'm currently feeling about Denver's political world. There's a lot of people who don't want me around -- in all of these spaces. It's hard for me to stay active in any of them. I keep finding ways. But probably I eventually won't be able to. And I really don't know what will happen after that.
Given that I feel like a lot of these shoving-out tactics in Denver's art, business, and political realms are based on color, i.e. that people of color like I are the targets of a lot of this group ostracism, I can see my social anxiety expressed in the dream imagery of this blonde, white woman wanting to re-brand retail spaces to make money off of K-pop (i.e. non-white culture) while not wanting to actually put this culture on any public-facing imagery.
A lot of the imagery about retailing in my second dream comes from my daily life, as I've been thinking a lot about retail spaces and branding over the past few weeks.
But I think the idea of putting imagery onto retail items definitely also comes from a YouTube video I watched last night, where Kelsey Lewin discusses the Sharp Nintendo TV, a TV with a Nintendo built into it that was sold in Japan in the late 1980s. The TV was scheduled for American sales as well, though it's unclear whether it ever made it onto American shelves.
In her video, Kelsey Lewin shows some of the research into retail catalogs from the time period to prove her belief that the Sharp Nintendo TV never actually made it onto the shelves. I found this image of Nintendo-branded pajamas so hilarious and cheesy and wonderful.
The apartment complex imagery probably comes from a couple things. On May 4th (Star Wars Day) I was browsing through YouTube. I found this video by Matt Stuertz, which references the legendary Star Wars Kid video, illustrates why stormtrooper blasters suck, and has a nice little Indiana Jones reference at the end.
The Indy reference at the end actually takes place in a balcony-like hallway in an apartment complex. I think this is what sifted into my dreams.
I also feel like the apartment balcony imagery came from the movie The Florida Project, which I love quite a bit and probably floated into my unconscious for a few reasons yesterday.
But I strongly feel the balcony imagery also comes from the imagery of the balconies of the Denver Pavilions, a sort of shopping mall on downtown Denver's 16th street mall. I go to the space occasionally, usually to see a movie at the theater there. And I think the space helped make that connection in my mind between retail spaces and apartment complexes. The space is sort of set up like an outdoor apartment complex for retail spaces, obviously.
At the end of the day, I feel like these dreams have a lot to do with my own fears of being pushed out of my physical space and pushed out of my social space. I feel like I've dealt with that so much in my life. But I think they also deal with my anxiety over seeing gentrification in so many Colorado neighborhoods, as well as seeing what I feel is the pushing out of people of color in the arts, business, and politics in Colorado, but specifically in Denver.
I may be trying in my dream to connect my selfish side with my social side, in order to make sense out of or unify both of these situations so I can come up with a creative solution to the problems. But I really can't say for sure.
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