Professor Lyndon Barrois Jr. and Kahlil Robert Irving present “Dreamsickle,” their second joint exhibition, which brings together ongoing dialogue between the two artists around collective experiences of time, memory, and the construction of perspective through cinema and digital media. The works in this exhibition shift between signifiers of simultaneous timelines and parallel existences, and bring into frame the life cycles of mediated dreams––how and when they end and are born again. “Dreamsickle” is on view at 47 Canal in New York City, September 10 through October 16.
In Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s circular installation, “Perpetual Dilation (2021),” closeup images of timepieces from an assortment of films highlight a complex weaving of narrative time. In cinema, such shots are deliberate, making the viewer aware of time constructed within a film and at points of its runtime. Cue marks, a material reference specific to celluloid film, punctuate each image. Where they once signaled to projectionists the end of a film, they function here as openings, or black holes for time hopping, looping each story into the same dimension. And a blood moon, for the end of times, hangs above the titular character, cast in shades of red, from Juzo Itami’s film “A Taxing Woman” (1987). Like the drama that unfolds in the sky or on screens, Barrois’ employment of film references captures the distance between images conjured and perceived––omnipresent yet out of reach or out of time. Timelessness is reflected in his floor sculptures of ready made sundials, an anachronistic technology displaying our static pursuit: “Grow old along with me the best is yet to be.”