Mining the subconscious for art

There’s a young girl on a dirt road. She’s well dressed and holding onto a rope like a leash, with a typewriter dragging behind her.

It’s the image that I can’t shake out of my head after checking out Dream within a Dream, the new exhibit that just opened at the Art Gallery of St. Albert. The image is only one of a series of staged figures in landscape photographs by Edmonton artist Tyler Enfield.

The weirdness of the girl with the typewriter pet lends itself to a certain dreamlike quality, though vaguely disturbing or unsettling somehow. She’s wearing a pretty flower print dress but her boots are untied. There are rain clouds lurking ominously in the background. The girl herself looks downtrodden. Perhaps it’s the hobo setup or the slightest of slight black circles under her eyes. This is not something you normally see in your waking life.

Enfield explained that this is something that cannot be helped, considering his inspiration.

“In most cases, there will be just an image. I’m sitting quietly at home and I’ll just feel really compelled to try and recreate that image. It’s usually kind of cinematic in how I picture it.”

That image, one of the Trials of the Young Novelist series, has a counterpart that features the typewriter’s point of view. His other works are thematically similar: another girl with eyes of different colours carries an hourglass and looks straight into the camera with a very sad expression. Her hat is an old folded newspaper announcing the death of John F. Kennedy.

All of Enfield’s works seem to feature young children in darkly-themed images. He said that he struggles to get the exact right composition or other detail in the images. Those clouds, he explained, were pasted in from one of his other photos.

Digital manipulation is de rigueur for Enfield’s gallery mate. Chicago’s Julie Nauman-Mikulski also makes excellent use of the technology at hand for her mixed-media collages in her Nocturne series.

Gift to Lamaja is a mermaid-shaped figure comprised of a Frankensteinian assortment of flowers, fish and human body parts. It still comes across as quite beautiful but does beg the viewer to peer closer, unlike Enfield’s works.

Road to Rishikesh, on the other hand, is far more abstract and mysterious. A smattering of yellow and murky grey-green bookends the left side while an empty cyan field in the lower right leads the viewer’s eye to what appears to be a tent and a table. These are all fairly well based in reality, Nauman-Mikulski explained, but the image still has the effect of making the mind wander around with ephemeral thoughts.

“The series is based directly on recorded dreams,” she began. “I do a lot of journaling and note-taking. I write down dreams. The ones that really stand out with a visual quality, I’ve been directly making pieces.”

This gives the work a wonderful quality of being based on and inspiring reverie at the same time.

“It’s almost like having a dialogue with your subconscious because it does seep into works. I’ll just start working, maybe I’ll see a photo or a painting that I did that is evocative in some way to me and I’ll start with that. It’s very back and forth.”