What’s the difference between real life and a new life? This question is at the heart of how human imagination has a role in the way society understands the shape it is in at any given point in history. It’s what allows for Utopias to be imagined, rather than religions to be perpetuated, because it’s how the difference between real and new is understood that allows us to think of today, now, as something that did not exist in the past, and will not necessarily be there in the future. Visual art has for a long time had a part to play in this, providing the visual manifestation of things that do not exist. For the longest part of human history, art has served to give visual shape to the narratives of religion; of people who never lived, of events that never took place, of places that never existed; it was an art that encouraged belief; enter any baroque Christian church, with its flying cherubs, elevating angels, and figures ascending to a sky where saints sit on clouds, and you witness the power of art to persuade you of a world entirely different to the one you inhabited, but one to which believers would have aspired, and which was forever separated from the real life in which everyone in fact lived.

Art changed when religion’s grip on the human imagination loosened. New Life and the Dream Garden loosely takes its inspiration from Thomas More’s book Utopia, written in 1515. More’s book appears to be a report about a mysterious land – Utopia – recounted by a traveller, in which the various customs, morals and forms of social and political organisation of the people of the island state are explored at length. More’s book is known as a sort of satire, offering itself as a serious account that cannot be taken seriously (even by the author), and in that way making it possible to air views about society during a period of severe conflict in Europe over the rule of the Catholic church, and of the emergence of humanist secular thinking more broadly.

This all seems a long way from New Life and the Dream Garden, but Utopianism has come a long way since More coined the term, and Utopianism in art has charted a changing course throughout the modern era. It influences the creative relationship between imagination and reality, and how that relationship expresses the sense of purpose that artists give to the art they make. Think of pictorial realism; if the French revolution overthrew a particular relationship between artists, the king or the church, it was not too long before artists would start to overthrow classical realism to claim a revolution in the way they saw reality, a development that led from Impressionism all the way to Cubism. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, artists would for a while again align themselves with the idea of social transformation, in the case of the Russian Futurists and Constructivists – Instead of a revolution of how we see reality, a revolution of the reality which we see.

The dynamic of this relationship, while nowhere near as extreme as during the period of nascent Modernism, still continues to be a factor in how artists today make and understand their work. Put simply, there is what there is, and the question for artists is what art can do, in whatever way, to affect what there is, here, now. The artists brought together in New Life and the Dream Garden respond to this demand through often quite different forms of practice; while a great number of the artists work in the medium of painting, drawing or sculpture, and most work with the static image, others adopt video or performance work, or work with the terms of architectural space, or even with the expanded terms of work which lies somewhere between art, psychological research and scientific experiment. Yet the exhibition nevertheless proposes a common thread between works which, at first glance, appear irreconcilably dissimilar. That common link lies in the artists’ general approach to how they represent elements of reality, which are then diverted along various routes of escape, asserting the artwork’s use of fantasy to contain and refuse the reality in which the work finds itself.

The relation between representation, distortion and transformation is one formulation of this intention. Yu-Chen Wang’s meticulous pencil drawings of apparently organic or biomorphic forms are also an investigation into the point at which a non-figurative line stops being a line and, with a little shading, starts to become a form which might represent something else. Wang’s drawings never impose a definite identity for these shapes; they operate between representational and decorative form, and while scattering clues about what they might be, they remain always in an in-between state, as lines gather and form into resolved objects, or disintegrate back in mere outline and sketch.

With a similar attention to the formal qualities of the medium, and how this affects the representation of a real thing, Sheena Macrae’s video Set, and her series of photographs of Los Angeles, from nowhere and are nowhere, use colour to transform images of otherwise ordinary reality. Set, a long tracking shot through a pool hall, in which the main source of light is the shaded lights above the pool tables, draws attention to the vivid green of the table tops, a colour which comes to dominate, in an almost hallucinatory way, the drifting sensation of the tracking camera. A similar hallucinatory transformation occurs in the intense sunsets and twilight scenes of Los Angeles, in which silhouetted cars and buildings seem to merge with the over-saturated burn of the setting sun, a dissolving world of forms, colours and signs.

Mauricio Lupini’s video work TV Show: Unidad de Habitacion takes a more elliptical approach to the margin between the real and the represented. By making a video recording of the reflections that appear on the turned-off TV screens in the living rooms of ordinary people, and then presenting those recordings on TVs in the gallery, Lupini makes a poetic intervention into the space between ‘here’ and ‘there’, between an artwork and the ‘ordinary’ world outside. Looking ‘through’ the ‘looking-glass’, Lupini’s TV Show questions spectatorship and reality in terms of art’s rejection of the mass media. Similarly, Lupini’s giant inkjet prints, blurred enlargements of protest graffiti found and photographed in the street, emphasise the institutional distance between the art gallery and the world beyond, in order to self-consciously reflect on how art reflects on reality.

If art that uses images necessarily allows for ‘reflection’ of the division between the real and the imaginary, between new and real life, then work in physical space must take a different approach. Mathijs Lieshout’s Anteroom, a bizarre expanding concertina of moving panel partitions, accessed through a doorway, allows the user to produce an internal space that encroaches on the space into which it projects. Any stable notion of inside or outside, or of coherently organised and permanent space, breaks down, and instead a curious psychology of colonisation develops, in which those inside the concertina open up this claustrophobic space only until met by resistance by those on the ‘outside’; a conflict made more absurd given that there can be no meaningful resolution to how the space can be divided up. Rather, what Lieshout’s structure remarks is how fixed architecture is a psychological constant on which our image of reality relies, a constant thrown into disarray by the comic futility of this changeable structure.

The tension of dissolution and deformation is also at stake, in a quite different register, in the more traditionally ‘sculptural’ works. Jorge Rivera’s various Dwarf and other figures, cast in polished Jesmonite, use the extreme legibility of the cartoon characters of the Disney universe to produce mutating, molten versions of the original seven dwarves, or Lil’ Bad Wolf, or Jiminy Cricket, in which only a glove or a hat or a toothy maw gives any indication of the original character. Such transformations are violent, comic and aggressive in their dissolution of the authoritative Disney characters, whose copyrighted identity is protected by all the legal machinery and media monopoly of the culture industry.

Playing with the empty ciphers of a monopolistic culture of mass imagery is also at work in the sculptures and paintings of Andro Semeiko, the paintings of Alicia Paz and in the collages of Gordon Cheung. Semeiko’s various knights in flying saucers, fetishistic paintings of banal objects, and his solar system of commoditised human body parts, each forming a ‘planet’, charts a grand satire; the clanking, forlorn knights, in their tragicomic search to find something authentic in this synthetic universe, never perceive that their mistake is to look for authenticity elsewhere, when it can already be found in their own purposeful, yet hopelessly misdirected quest.

In Cheung’s lurid, airless and psychedelic landscape Technophobia, figured on a ground made up of the pages of the Financial Times, a dismal estate of ossified tower blocks provide the screen onto which the repeated figure of a Scooby-Doo ghost appears, terrorising a host of faceless, head-like blobs. Cheung’s images picture a dead world in which inauthenticity and mass-produced culture reign – yet by such picturing, Cheung manages both to force us to recognise it as a real aspect of current life, and consider how to negate it through its morbidly over-saturated exaggeration.

Conversely, Alicia Paz’s paintings examine the possibility of making a painting whose authenticity occurs precisely through the recombination of many already existing styles and genres of gestural, abstract and figurative painting. Here these different forms of ‘expression’ appear as constituent elements that become part of the greater, organic growth of the tree. Here human and inhuman, natural and synthetic, conscious and unconscious processes of formation are dramatised to interrogate the idea of the artist’s ‘self’, a subject which appears somewhere amongst the multiplicity of faces and figures that occur as ‘fruit’ of her hybrid trees; the self may be a synthetic, constructed thing, but Paz’s paintings suggest that its formation is nevertheless an active and generative event.

Other tragicomic satires of the romantic artistic tradition of self-expression, and its relationship to the dead weight of visual and cultural conventions can be found in Nick Goulis’s rigorously reduced paintings. Goulis’s paintings are pared-down testaments to the artist’s search for a mode of expression that is both sincere and aware of the dangers of clichéd expression. Using the unyielding and unsympathetic medium of glass-paint, Goulis creates barely-viable figures and scenes which express a sense of failure and attenuated ambition, or of barely contained disaster. Goulis’s humble, dispassionate and de-dramatised approach subtly rejects melodrama and spectacle to expose the fragility of how an artist might respond, with sincerity, to lived experience.
A more playful assault on the desire for an authentic life occurs in performance and mixed-media of the duo Lakis and Aris Ionas, and their glamorously inept two-man rock band The Callas. The Callas creat an entire aesthetic universe from a life based on do-it-yourself hedonism and the self-fulfilling conviction that if you want to become a rock-star-superhero simply by acting like one and wearing a superman outfit, you can; however shoddy your stage props, and however shaky your musical skills!

Thinking of art as a methodology of conviction, Toine Klaassen’s approach to art-as-research reveals how art may only be that form of activity that doesn’t conform to any other discipline of knowledge, or regulation of action. Klaassen’s in-residence activity produces a complex mix of taxonomical and empirical research, combining psychological and subjective investigations with a self-ironising mysticism that plays satirically with mainstream culture’s obsession with the artist-figure as a sort of ‘visionary’ primitive. Klaassen is both deadly earnest and impishly deceptive in his manipulation of the contradictory forms of his brand of esoteric rationalism.

New Life and the Dream Garden produces a space in which each artist is revealed as various kinds of awkward interloper into the deficiencies of the world as it is. Each is a critic and a dreamer. Each is dissatisfied with the real world, yet hopeful enough that their work is able to change the texture of some part of it. This isn’t conducted in the sincere hope of revolution or reform, but in recognition that what artworks can often do is inject a ‘margin of error’ into reality, which warps some temporary, local part of it, creating a partial opening onto the division between what is and what could be. That it doesn’t demand a systematic, coherent and final vision of how things should be is part of the tension at the root of Utopian thinking; totalising Utopias mostly fail, because reality is more complex than they realise. The artists in New Life and the Dream Garden each offer only what they know they can convincingly present as some partial transformation. Collectively, the exhibition exists as a place where all these partial moments cohabit, for a time, in common difference to what lies outside; a garden, of sorts.

JJ Charlesworth