Daniel Boyd: Dream Time

Daniel Boyd
Dream Time

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is pleased to present Dream Time, Daniel Boyd's first solo exhibition in France, which includes a series of new paintings and an intervention in dialogue with the gallery's architecture. With his unique pictorial language, Daniel Boyd seeks to “de-locate our visual perception from a single entry to one of multiplicity” by directing our gaze toward narratives obscured by empire and oppressive cultural framework. Taking as his subject landscapes, historical representations, and portraits linked to his own personal history, heretofore invisible, as well as iconic figures rarely depicted in the visual arts, Daniel Boyd continues to transmit and transpose his cultural and artistic traditions while expanding our collective imagination.

The title of the exhibition responds to “dreamtime,” the term given by early European anthropologists to define what they understood to be the mythology behind the natural order of things for most Australian Aboriginal groups, proposing a reductive vision of their cultures, which are both highly diverse and interconnected by complex narrative networks. Boyd, who is of plural origins (descended from indigenous Australians and South Sea islanders), splits the term dreamtime into binary opposites (Dream Time), allowing the uncontrollable nature of a dream to be freed from the European linear and controlled perception of time. By way of poiesis, those who have been uprooted and culturally assimilated have arrived at a new constellation of narratives liberated from time and space, selecting stories addressed to new generations. Through each new series of paintings Boyd seeks to redress and overturn existing hierarchies of aesthetic forms and representations.