Clare Rojas, *Patriarchy walking the dog with an extend-a-leash*, 2021. Oil on linen. 50 x 40 inches. Collection of Charlotte and Herbert S. Wagner III. Artwork © Clare Rojas. Image courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. Photograph by Phillip Maisel.

“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”

Dreams are an experience research cannot fully comprehend. It is also the only human experience that truly belongs to the individual. Musicians, writers, and artists incessantly attempt to communicate this phenomenon through uses of artistic expression yet somehow, they can never fully place their thumb on it. Maybe this is because the word ‘dream’ has no universal definition.

Robin K. Williams, a curator at The Contemporary Austin, has contributed to the museum for approximately three years and welcomes the highly anticipated exhibition, IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY, opening on September 17th.

This exhibition is nothing shy of a newfangled concept gallery centered around the motifs of modern social construction and dream deconstruction. Eight female artists present multimedia works, aimed at storytelling and making viewers comfortable with the ambiguity of dreams. Williams insists, “one of the things art can really help us do is to build empathy. I hope people will be able to come into the exhibition with an open heart and open mind and be able to be receptive—receptive to understanding someone who's very different from you.”

Dreams possess a nonconforming nature, and while they mean something different to each person, The Austin Contemporary has curated an exhibition that will allow you to catch a glimpse of someone else’s dreams—dreams that may not appear to be dreams at all. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Adriana Corral, Ellie Ga, Juliana Huxtable, Tala Madani, Danielle Mckinney, Wendy Red Star, and Clare Rojas are taking ownership of their dreams and shedding a harsh and saturated light on the ‘dead-end perspective’ dreams take when accessibility is distributed solely to privilege.

IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY will be open to the public until February 12, 2023. Read Flaunt’s interview with Robin K. Williams Below.

Danielle Mckinney, *Prospect*, 2022. Acrylic on canvas. 24 x 18 inches. Artwork © Danielle Mckinney. Courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Image courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photograph by Pierre Le Hors.

The exhibition is titled, IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY—could you give me an overview of this title?

The title comes from a work by Jenny Holzer, a really prominent feminist and socially engaged artist. She came to prominence around 1980 and is known for works that intervene in the public sphere and really critically analyze discourse in media or public speech. She inspires people to take action to change the conditions of reality. The exhibition is a gathering of eight female artists, each of them in many different ways is really confronting received patriarchal power structures and creating works that make space for new forms of representation while encouraging us to think about who we are and what is possible.

That phrase is like a current—it connects the very different projects that each of the eight artists is doing in this show. Whether it's constructs of identity, or the ways in which archives and histories shape certain narratives and determine more or less whose stories are told, whose stories are suppressed, whose lives are privileged or subjected to violence. We're gathering female artists who are both cis and trans from a wide variety of backgrounds and centering their voices and perspectives. It's really a way of addressing the patriarchal structure and also white supremacy in this country. And so doing that in a way that also simultaneously opens up new spaces and creates opportunities to seek refuge and joy and possibilities to reimagine those very structures to open up a new path forward.

Was this core message already a vision going into exhibition curation? Did the artists come to you or did you find them beforehand and curate the other way around?

To be honest, it was a little bit of a process of both working from both sides and that's because the exhibition grew. It was originally a smaller project and it grew to become one that is occupying the entire downtown museum, as well as having site-specific projects at Laguna Gloria, the sculpture museum. It started with a subset of artists and then they were drawn together really for the ways in which they were approaching narrative and power structures using satire and humor, so there really was already a core. But, in fleshing that idea out, it became a more intentional process of drawing together artists who are approaching that topic. There are two major sections—one on the ground floor and one upstairs. The ground floor artists who are using the human figure: paintings, animations, photo collages, and videos all thinking about how subjectivity or identity is constructed and addressing constructs of gender and the power dynamics of gender. Then upstairs are artists who have a very conceptual research-driven practice. They're thinking about systems: systems of knowledge, archives and histories of systems plus the way people's lives and histories are represented in how we memorialize, but also shape and reframe for the future. Once those two central themes started to really crystallize, it became a process of making it feel robust and compelling while speaking to a wide range of subjects in terms of representation.

Juliana Huxtable, *Infertility Industrial Complex 2*, 2019. Wallpaper, inkjet print, CNC cut mounted, and printed paper. Dimensions variable. Artwork © Juliana Huxtable. Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York. Image courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York.

What do you anticipate will be the takeaway for viewers who don't necessarily identify with the artist’s stories?

What I hope people take away is learning to identify with a perspective that is not your own. When I was talking about really wanting to build out these presentations, it’s so you feel like you're really able to step into someone else's creation. One of the things art can really help us do is to build empathy. I hope people will be able to come into the exhibition with an open heart and open mind and be able to be receptive—receptive to understanding someone who's very different from you.

How does the physical location of this exhibit—Austin, Texas—correlate with the overarching message?

Our museum is right down the street from the Texas Capitol building. You walk out the front door of our museum, you look to the left and seven blocks down the road you see the State Capitol. It's on Congress Avenue. It's a dead-end perspective. We were really thinking too about the fact that this exhibition opens in September and closes in February—leading up to the midterm elections. Texas has a really critical gubernatorial election this year. There is a way in which some of the artworks are more overtly political, others are more implicitly political, but we really want people to think about how art functions in a social and a political space.

Austin also has a culture that's really supportive of experimentation. That's really a legacy of artist-driven projects and experimental approaches and very multimedia approaches and experiential culture. It's an institution and a context that can support an artist in taking different steps.

Tala Madani, *The Womb* (still), 2019. Single-channel color animation. Running time: 03:26. Edition of 6, 2 AP. Artwork © Tala Madani. Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles / New York. Image courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles / New York.

On particular artist commissions:

We have another commission by the artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and it's a commission that we are doing in partnership with Meta Open Arts. She's going to be doing an AR commission so when people come into the gallery there will be an interactive AR component. Danielle’s work is really about centering Black trans lives. She thinks about archiving as a way of creating knowledge. There will be a video monitor screen. It'll be interactive and showing the visitors body as implicated in the idea of the archive and how text functions as archives. She also thinks about the technology behind digital spaces and how algorithms function in these same ways to control who is allowed in and out of those spaces. I think people in Austin are going to really love it because Austin has become a major tech center.

You were talking about dreams in conversation with the title of this exhibit and Jenny Holzer—what popped into my mind was this idea of the American Dream. Given the current political climate do you think this exhibit could be a reassessment of what the word ‘dream ‘ means to the individual?

Absolutely. We're going to be confirming some speakers and I'm hoping to get somebody to speak on precisely that topic. You're really hitting on just exactly what I hope that people will pick up for sure.