Mystifed, La Trobe Visual Art Centre, Bendigo, 2012.
Photographic artist Maggie MacCathie-Nevile and poet Jessica Raschke explore the shadowy boundaries between dreaming and waking life in Mystified. Their works focus on the ways in which our visual imaginations create, encounter and comprehend imagery in our dream landscapes. Mystified plays with notions of light and dark in various metaphorical senses, particularly lightness and darkness of meaning, experience and reality.
Dreams often provide intimate and intense emotional experiences, and most dreamers will emerge from a dream feeling both fascinated and mystified by these encounters. Indeed, psychoanalysts have long explored dreams, particularly Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as a means to understand our subconscious lives and desires.
Dreams are symbolically rich. They open up a whirlwind of potentially unseen images or unexplored meanings, and they are evidence of our imaginative capacities. Dreams can be enlightening and frightening, yet the fact that they emerge from our (mostly) unknown selves provides seductive pathways for meaning. In this sense, dreams can simultaneously develop greater self-understanding and self-mystification. This paradoxical condition is a significant source of fascination.