The Dream Technology exhibit at Flux Media Gallery is the result of a collaborative community collage project that involved 13 people who celebrated and explored ideas relating to Black history and futures. The exhibit came out of a community project for Black History Month, says assistant curator Josh Ngenda.
“We were just really trying to think of things to do for the Black community here in Victoria and give people the chance to express different ideas in an arts kind of context,” he says. “That’s where it started from.”
The idea that holds everything together in the exhibit are the collages, which were based on the same source material for each contributor and made through a workshop.
“The workshop itself was more focused on collaging techniques, like different things that you can express and ways that you can engage with images and ideas,” says Ngenda. “So, everyone took that in different directions in terms of what they were thinking about and trying to express with the collages.”
The exhibit also features audio recordings of interviews with the artists involved.
“One really cool thing about it, especially when you go to the exhibit and listen to the interviews, it’s like hearing all the different ways that people’s ideas overlap, and people were pretty independently working on this project,” says Ngenda. “But there’s a lot of common themes tying it all together.”
This is Flux’s first project like this, but Ngenda says they hope to do more.
“Definitely, I think we’re hoping to do more projects that engage with the community in the future,” he says. “Flux runs a lot of art workshops for people trying to learn different skills.”
Ngenda says that the name of the exhibit is all about the importance of dreaming and thinking about what lays ahead.
“That title really came from the idea of thinking about the potential and the power of thinking and dreaming about the future, and creating a vision of what things could be or what you would like to see in the world, and how important that is, just to be able to have that in your life and give you grounding and direction,” he says.
Ngenda says that one interesting aspect of this is that most of the people who took part in the workshop wouldn’t call themselves artists before being involved.
“One of the really cool things is just the potential that anyone has to make art and express ideas in an interesting way,” he says.
Dream Technology
Until Friday, June 24
By donation, Flux Media Gallery
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