Lucid Dreams catalog- Itamar Freed & Kristina Chan

Lucid Dreams - Itamar Freed & Kristina Chan Itamar Freed and Kristina Chan present photographic works that search for vanishing notions of realness in the natural world. Influenced by post-impressionism, Japanese prints and contemporary photography, Lucid Dreams questions the veracity of the photograph in the tension between the real and the fantastic. As in a lucid dream, the artists control the narrative, characters and environment in the depicted landscapes. The work features photographs of places and sites the artists have visited, combined with images from curated environments such as museums, zoos, and digital materials. Freed and Chan question how images of places might displace or augment their understanding and memory of them.

Each work began as a digital photograph that was then printed on Japanese paper as cyanotypes, lithographs, etchings and pigment prints. By combining technological and traditional media the works are displaced in time and space, decontextualizing the image. The subject is isolated allowing the selective role of the human lens to come into focus. The seen and the associations and memories of the artists merge to form a narrative between the viewer and the place. An experiential space is crafted between fact and fiction, fantasy and reality. This allows the artists to reflect on their own displacement.

Freed and Chan work with themes of geographic and physical displacement, and seek to preserve nature in the form of artefacts – historical objects that exist independently of a specific period in time.

Chan’s work explores site-specific history and narratives. She seeks the intimacy and reverence of forgotten spaces, shaped to suit human needs that have been rendered obsolete. Freed’s work features habitats from across the globe, and questions the distinctions between natural and artificial, real and manufactured. Images of landscapes, natural history museums, botanical gardens, zoos and the artist’s studio are combined to create an array of fictitious places that exist solely within the photographic frame. In Lucid Dreams, Freed and Chan continue to interrogate the presentation of nature through a human lens.