What Dreams May Come

Photography and art connoisseur Roderick van der Lee was kind enough to write an introduction for our ANOTHER CANVAS collaboration with Sergei Sviatchenko. Inspired by the fundamental question behind the project, he shared his insights in an essay where he offers his perspective on how images have come to move through culture at the highest possible speed, but not without losing their ability to impact it, one way or another!

In the 1998 American fantasy drama film of this title, directed by Vincent Ward, we are presented with spectacular visuals of wondrous landscapes in the afterlife, created by a recently deceased man from his own imagination. The sources of this imagination, are of course found in the memories of his life, as he experienced it.

Just like these landscapes, the title and the premise of the film also come from earlier incarnations: the film is based on a novel from 1978 by Richard Matheson, and it’s title ‘what dreams may come’, is in turn a phrase from Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. All these incarnations use the notion of ‘dreams’ for the subconscious reframing of past occurrences in a visual way. Just like we do every night.

As such, there is a beautiful parallel to be suggested to ‘Another Canvas’ by Sergei Sviatchenko. Dreamlike, surreal images are conjured up by the artist, using earlier work as elements. His artworks are distinctly unique and have their own visual narrative, yet the original visual building blocks echo through.

With that in mind, we might draw an even further, broader parallel to the nature of the Arts themselves. In every creation, there is always a reference to or element of other, previous work. Sometimes intentional, sometimes not. Sometimes with the same, or a similar message, and sometimes with a completely different meaning. Through hommage, inspiration, copying, sampling, collage or even just the knowledge that the artist’s concept of an apple is based on every notion of an apple he has previously absorbed, creation is a continuous and expanding flow of artistic expressions, which the artist has observed and passes on with his own distinct creative adaptation.

Returning to the theme of mortality of ‘What Dreams May Come’, as well as the question that Joachim Baan and Christoph van Veghel posed on the outset of this project (What is the residual value of an image shared on the internet in today’s volatile visual culture?), a connection could be made to the explanation that the current Dalai Lama once gave about the notion of immortality of a specific incarnation, when trying to explain it to a western mind: If a cup of tea falls on the floor and shatters, the cup will be broken, and is no more. The cup is just the holder of the essence, the tea however, which is absorbed by everything it touches: the rug, the wooden floor beneath it, the curtains it touched, and so on.

So even in that sense, when images seem to disappear at hyperspeed in this digital age, they do get absorbed into the collective visual culture, that is the great source of new creation, the expanding creative universe. Sometimes only as a tiny drop of inspiration, and sometimes in a much more substantial form, when they become formative elements on another canvas.