Heady Dreams Collide in Bushwick

The current joint exhibition Stone Dreams at apartment-turned-gallery ORGY PARK features the space’s founder/resident, Steve Mykietyn, and London-based artist Keef Winter. Spanning two zones — Mykietyn’s backyard and its connected basement — the show explores the mystery of dreams. Accordingly, the press release waxes mellifluous: “Dreams collide as a hammer swings or heartstrings strum, in time to the pulse of the stone, the illusion of stone, the Stone Dream.” While this rhythm emerges in the basement, it’s lost in translation from paper to yard, where the domestic atmosphere overshadows the artworks themselves.

The basement holds a combination of Mykietyn’s paintings and Winter’s sculptures, which play off each other harmoniously. The three-dimensionality of the stacked polygons of Winter’s “Allotropes at sea” dissolves into the two-dimensional webs of shapes forming Mykietyn’s colorful acrylics. Sitting in the center of the room, Winter’s “Dreams of France,” a large pentagonal structure made of shrink-wrap and pine, acts as a lens through which to view the surrounding pieces, its lines accenting the geometric foundations of Mykietyn’s compositions.

Upstairs, the pair made a conscious decision to “have a domestic space with the work with it, a yard with sculpture works poised within normal garden furniture,” Winter told Hyperallergic. Unfortunately, in the resulting presentation, the artworks are consumed by their surroundings. Even with a labeled schematic in hand, I struggled to pinpoint the three unmarked sculptures from within the jumble of chairs, wooden stilts, garden tools, and stone slabs scattered around. Winter’s “Allotrope in garden,” a diamond-shaped plaster sculpture, hangs bashfully in a corner, standing out only when the sun hits its stark white surface. “Cream Dream,” a cement version of the same piece, crudely towers above the space like a makeshift lamppost. Winter’s installation “Tarp Dream” consists of an LED strip lining a skinny, rectangular wooden frame pressed against the yard shed’s already cluttered exterior. At night, visitors may fiddle with remotes to generate strobe-like effects in the yard, producing an unearthly atmosphere similar to the scene in the artists’ online video; however, during the day, “Tarp Dream” is switched off, rendering it nearly invisible.

The show finally extends into the living room, with Mykietyn’s “Warm Morning,” a bedsheet the artist used as a painter’s tarp, an incongruous, strung-up footprint of its companions in the show. But it works: Stone Dreams is most persuasive through this kind of interactivity that speaks to the fluidity and metamorphosis of dreaming.

Stone Dreams continues at Orgy Park (237 Jefferson Street 1B, Bushwick, Brooklyn) through June 20.