Dare to dream at Wollongong Art Gallery’s newest exhibition

Image: Patrick Pound, Anonymous disbanded newspaper archive photograph, 2024, found photograph. Courtesy of the artist, STATION and Darren Knight Gallery.

Max Dupain’s famous photograph of the sleeping sunbaker has come out of the archives and is on display in Wollongong Art Gallery’s latest exhibition.

However, the image isn’t just hung on the wall for admiring eyes. In Dream Vitrine artist and collector Patrick Pound has taken the well-known image and asked ‘what might this image dream of?’

The answer, for Pound, are a series of jigsaw puzzle boxes featuring found photographs of beachcombers.

It’s this concept of taking items from the Gallery’s collection and then imagining what it might dream about, that informs Pound’s latest exhibition, which opened last weekend. The exhibition includes items from the Gallery’s own collection, alongside objects, images and items he has collected and assembled.

“In this fascinating exhibition Patrick reimagines the gallery’s collection from being an assortment of artworks and objects to become things that have a life and a personality of their own,’’ Wollongong Art Gallery Director Daniel Mudie Cunningham said.

“It’s a really fascinating approach and one that really sparks the imagination as you walk through the exhibition and see images and objects interacting with one another.’’

New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist Pound, who has previously had a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, and featured in more than 80 curated exhibitions in New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, England, Korea, Italy, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the UK and USA, is renowned for his exhibitions that explore the concept of collections, and how systems are used to order objects.

Dream Vitrine isn’t just an exhibition within the Gallery – it also extends to the architecture of the building itself.

For the exhibition the artist has explored his gallery of 70,000 found photographs for images of windows where the subject is inside a window looking out. A selection of these window images feature on the Gallery’s exterior panels.

“These images are really eye-catching and invite the viewer to consider what is going on inside the Gallery and, I hope, encourages people to walk through the glass doors and discover one of the state’s largest regional galleries for themselves,’’ Mr Mudie Cunningham said.

Dream Vitrine is at Wollongong Art Gallery until 16 November. There are a series of public programs including a photobook workshop, collectors conference, film screenings, drawing workshops and a lecture on the history of the archives. For more details, visit the Wollongong Art Gallery website.