Exhibition: Patrick Traer: don't tell me your dreams

Patrick Traer’s exhibition, don’t tell me your dreams, is on view at the Mendel Art Gallery from June 19 to September 13, 2009. Traer is a U of S alumnus (BA, English Literature) and former professor (Art & Art History).

From the Mendel Art Gallery website:
This exhibition presents a new, poetic installation of mixed media works by well-known Canadian artist Patrick Traer: don’t tell me your dreams features themes around lost sleep, solitude, and darkness. This is the first solo exhibition for Traer at the Mendel Art Gallery since 1983.

don’t tell me your dreams brings together ideas stemming from the artist’s diagnosis with sleep apnea in 2004, along with images and sounds related to what he calls a long-standing “anxious indifference” to listening to other people recount their dreams. It follows his ongoing concern, since the early 1990s, with the body’s fluidity, its incubation periods, biological obsolescence, and mythologies about human anatomy. don’t tell me your dreams is an exhibition in darkness, consisting of photographs, audio, drawing, and embroidery.

Patrick Traer, whose background includes writing and psychology, has a BA in English Literature from the University of Saskatchewan and an MFA from York University, Toronto. He has exhibited his work widely across Canada. Traer was a professor of fine arts at the University of Saskatchewan for 18 years, and is currently teaching studio art at Concordia University in Montreal.

image: Patrick Traer, whistling without the imperative of analysis, concept sketch #3, 2009.
Cut paper photo collage, re-photographed, digitally enhanced and printed. Image courtesy of the artist.