Dream Logic
Özgül Kılınçarslan
Dream Logic at first sight seems to be the coexistence of conflicting or completely opposite concepts. However, it is a key definition for opening a gap for reflection in terms of our faculty of envisaging, intuition and comprehension. We can create a space for a sound basis of real knowledge when we can bring together rational intelligence, intuition and emotion. This is why the expression “dream logic” is not an oxymoron. If we accept the existence of a logical logic for imagination, dream logic is neither different from the ordinary waking thought nor it is inferior to or obeying it. Dream logic embraces our most primitive animal desires and most sublime spiritual desires, as well as our darkest fears and brightest joys. It offers a wider range of experience and reality than the one normally recognized by waking consciousness. But the autonomous otherness of imaginations emerging in dreams makes it a disturbing phenomenon for many people. Our dreams create awareness regarding unwanted strange memories and disturbing emotions and thus threaten the hegemony of the waking ego.
In Merve Şendil’s works we see the autonomous otherness that the images recognized by waking consciousness acquire under the influence of imagination and dreams. Looking at a pink polar bear in order to remember the best and the challenging perspectives of dreaming and the otherness of imaginations coming from another planet goes out of the hegemony of the waking ego and stimulates to revise and question the concept of being us and not being us. The pink polar bear that appears in Pinkypole settles into a verdant landscape which reverses the cold whiteness of the poles. In Şendil’s works, semantic displacement appears in many ways. Besides the appearance of a familiar image in an unusual way or in a way that we might only consider it as ordinary in a dream universe, the colour palette, paint texture and pixelated images used by the artist makes one experience a thus enlarged dream effect which moves forward and backward to different zones of reality. Although “Always outside of something” at first sight seems to refer to the traditional setup of landscape painting, it contrasts the classical sunset image that we are used to see on the horizontal plane. Vertical composition is more challenging in terms of visual perception. Therefore, it creates a specific tension. It takes the sunset and cloud images in our mind on a journey towards the winding depths of personal and collective consciousness, just as the dream goes much more beyond only repeating memories and scenes from previous days. “Because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars” is a work symbolically referring to both the rose image and the story of the little prince. But the fact that the rose image in this work is depicted in the artist’s own size enables us to add figurative and self-portrait references to the painting. The rose image symbolically represents gracefulness, nobility and what is rare and fragile. The rose that appears in the work entitled “Because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars” turns into a figure that stands firm on the ground and simultaneously contains in itself both fragility and endurance existing in its own emptiness.
During the preparation for the figure-based narrative works such as “On top of the world for an instant” or “But she was laughing while she was in it”, Merve Şendil makes use of professional models and does studio shoots. In this regard, the preparation process of these works also turns into a work. In the preliminary researches for these works that simultaneously construct both the dreaming person and the world of the dreaming person, the naming of the works is also included in this process. The naming of the works that encompasses more than one spheres of judgement on an imaginative and semantic level is an inseparable part of Şendil’s universe just as it was in the previous exhibitions. “On top of the world for an instant” is an image that pulls in the audience through its additions similar to bizarre and somewhat scary but familiar queen images. The queen looking straight ahead at us creates a double illusion. We remain somewhere in between looking into the eyes of a queen who looks at us and looking at our image in the mirror, at a boundary between wakefulness and a world of imagination. For those who know Şendil’s other works, the crown on her head and also the frame selected for this painting is a suggestion for a new queen. The glamorous frame that resembles the carved, engraved frames in traditional paintings but has a modern form includes the playful character and sometimes the happy and entertaining dimensions of dreams into the audience’s imagination and makes us look at our previous acknowledgements again, just as the suggestion made by “But she was laughing while she was in it” regarding the ghost idea in our mind…
A reinterpretation of the work “The adventures of the yellow ball” dated 2005, the installation seems to separate from the world of paintings due to its media and technique but when looking closely we realize that it is complementary to that world on an imaginative and semantic level. While joining the zone of dreams, which alternates between sensations, memories, comprehension and reasoning, with the geometry shaped by rational mind, on one hand, it takes one on a journey in the yellow ball’s universe by also referring to the square pixels in the paintings, on the other hand. In this way, Dream Logic makes a suggestion regarding the requirement that the mind has to extend beyond rational analysis in order to reach other ways of knowing.
