Grove Collective is pleased to present the upcoming group exhibition Dream Weaver, featuring artists Seren Metcalfe, Jesse Pollock, Ernesto Renda, and Amba Sayal-Bennett, on view at Grove Collective’s Battersea space from March 10th to April 9th, 2022. This is the first time that Grove Collective has worked with any of these artists, and marks the first time that these artists have shown together.
There is something romantic in the idea of a Dream Weaver. Gary Wright captures the sentiment well enough in the opening verse of his iconic song by the same name, singing “Climbed aboard the Dream Weaver train/Driver, take away my worries of today/And leave tomorrow behind.” Ethereal and care-free, the Dream Weaver, like the dreams they conjure, is a figure of non-earthly delight, unburdened, or indeed spurred on by our daily troubles.
But this conception of dreams feels closer to trope than to reality. Alternative (or contradictory) conceptions of dreaming proliferate throughout popular culture and personal experience, underscoring how linked to our lives our dreams really are. From early psychoanalysis’ insistence on dreams as a site of turned-over trauma, to the nonsensicality and mundanity of what runs through many of our collective heads on a nightly basis, perhaps the real Dream Weavers more closely resemble cynical malefactors, or bored itinerants, weaving nightly as only a way to pass the time.
