The Dreamers (Enter the Grotto)
The Dreamers (Enter the Grotto)
By Marina Roy
The Dreamers (Enter the Grotto) is inspired by the aesthetic tradition of the grotesque, the mythic Waqwaq/Jinmenju tree, the notion of the axis mundi, and the western phylogenetic tree of life that traces out evolutionary relationships between biological life forms. The encyclopedic illustration aesthetic of the outermost panels combines natural life forms with human/human-made forms (our hybrid world of nature-culture). These forms might evoke a kind of “standing reserve” of figures that could be added to the central panel of the tree, which is giving birth to myriad life forms. The work also points to how dreams might be constructed within the unconscious.
Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer, and associate professor of visual art at the University of British Columbia. Her artwork investigates the grotesque, at the intersection of language, image, and materiality, and her research interests include ecology, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics. Humour is explored through a corporeal register: humans’ underlying animality and mortality.
