Special Projects: Dream World, 2017

Dream World

Dream World was a collaborative painting project where I (Craig Paul Nowak) worked with a group of students from Henry Ford Academy in Detroit, MI, to create an overall image that represented the group's collective social subconscious.

The students all chose characters that represented how they saw themselves. They then chose symbolic landscapes that represented their inner worlds. I combined their landscape images to create a hypothetical collective "Dream World" and subsequently, I painted that world on an immersive 9ftx20ft canvas for the student's characters to inhabit. After the students each painted their own characters on canvas, those paintings were then cut out and sewn to the larger landscape.

With this painting, my goal was to depict a collective portrait without depicting the people the portrait portrays. I wanted to express the idea that not all portraits are figurative, and also that not all representations of people are depictions of their faces. In many ways, I believe that an image representing the collective persona of a group of youth can, at times, be a more palpable portrayal of who they are and how they're feeling at any given time. And especially for youth, I believe this is an infinitely more engaging portrayal than a straight on depiction or portrait might be.

Manal Kadry assisted the students with their paintings and Henry Ford Academy, School of The Arts, funded its production.