OFLUXO

In the midst of cramped and crumbling cities, being unable to be either contained in our skulls or put to action, dreams boil over and, vapourised, come piping out of our ears like hot steam. They coat the pillows we sleep on, settling there, or, lifted by a smoggy breeze, go trailing out the window, gobbled up by the violet night sky.
Perhaps it’s our own wretched excess of dreams that steams open the seams of cities like an iron over the sealed envelope of someone else’s letter. Are we asking too much? Everywhere there is longing for safe harbour and fertile conditions. Everywhere this longing goes unsatisfied. Above a doorway Jake Kent’s carved eviction notice materialises.

Fissures appear in the streets of North Melbourne where Alethea Everard was born and where she remains. They are filled with bitumen, with which she coats her paintings. They are patched with acrylic and plaster and mementos too, and sprayed with enamel paint stencils – apparitions that won’t go away, like a recurring dream.

A1, A1, Jacket, Jacket, Jacket, Journalist. These times are jacked up, accelerated and muscle bound. Meanwhile this libidinous and violent place doesn’t give a fuck about you. Is the answer violent and libidinal in turn? It’s all falling apart anyway.

Gather your things about you: your sticks, leaves, and diary pages, your laundry, crush it up, and make yourself a hermit’s cosy nest. Swim in your own dream soup. Or vent some of your dream-steam through tonsures in your skull like holes punctured in ceramic or in pierced flesh. These ceramic light boxes have earrings and adornments aplenty!

The purpose of tonsures is to get closer to God who I guess is present in music and other people. Communal living in a Garden of Eden is what we are drawn to “naturally” – see the kids frolic in the underpass of an urban Australian backwater. No tempting trees here 😉 We’re leaving detritus of ourselves everywhere but what does it amount to? Nothing much if you ask the Dudley Street mansions or Liebig 34 of yore. In sculptures and paintings it is reassembled and given a fresh start, a fair go, a shake of the sauce bottle.

Regardless, these pieces of ourselves will one day scatter to the four corners of the Earth and beyond, and only they will know what we did, coated in dream residue and having watched over us for thousands of years. They outlive us with insane persistence. Laundry hangs over streets and back alleys. Patches, trash, and hair woven into a rat’s tail. As you enter the city from its outskirts you see the streets become more and more dense. Let there be light!

And there was: See now a dream where the people start to outgrow their homes with abandon, expanding to giant size and poking holes in the sides with massive arms and distended legs until the cramped rooms burst open, and sun shines in. A stew of phantasmic dream matter pours out and runs, steaming, down the road.