I'm on a deadline to finish the final two pieces in the Proust series. Author Virginia Barry is presenting at the national conference for the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York in January and submitted the art pieces for the accompanying art exhibition. The work has been accepted and the plan is to prepare posters of all nine pieces in the series featuring Dr. Barry's explanatory text for each chapter along with the Proust quotation, literal photographs and image of each art piece.
These final pieces address the big daunting topics of Dreams and Psychoanalysis. Going back to Proust's In Search of Lost Time, the pieces need to convey a complete re-ordering of space and time. Proust makes the argument that it is when past and present merge that time can be altered and even temporarily halted. Dr. Barry discusses the importance of this concept in the practice of psychoanalysis where "the halting of time occurs as the multiple layers of existence are allowed to exist simultaneously, and one can be as a child in the presence of one's adult self, and use one's adult self to heal the child" (p. 6).
The goal for these two pieces is to connect a fragmented, disorienting Dream piece with the bigger picture in a flourishing, thriving Psychoanalysis piece. All elements in these pieces are now reworked as curving and vining elements, suggesting fluidity of time, interconnectedness of experience and flourishing and thriving. Our central 'constructive memory' circles become a path that points to illumination and the concept of the journey. Curved and fragmented text elements connect with the function of experience being consolidated and organized in dreaming and point to the importance of language as a tool in analysis. New ambiguous compositional elements can be read as a code or information or connect with literal imagery in pervious pieces.
This is an admittedly ambitious plan for 12" x 16" pieces but offers a complete re-working of the basic compositional structure into a fragmented, abstract vision of dreaming and a flourishing, blooming concept for psychoanalysis.
See all pieces in the Proust series.