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In James Lynch's hands, dreams come to life on the screen as beautifully rendered moments, moving from frame to frame as though the transition from dream-state to gallery has been filtered through a time lapse, the memory hazy in detail but powerful in theme. Lynch is a dream-catcher. He has been working with other people's dreams for some time now, dreams in which he is either a central or peripheral figure. These are not nightmares or sweat-soaked erotica, but rather the dreams of little or nothing that take on epic proportions in wakefulness.
 
For the exhibition 'New05' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 2005, Lynch installed a large screen surrounded by a tier of seating - a strange, outdoor cinema inside the gallery space and surrounded by party lights. On the screen three core animated 'dreams' were played out. In the first, I was running and running, 2004, a large self-portrait of Lynch reads from cards in a painstakingly slow, stilted voice: 'I was running and running with a coffee pot. Everybody was there, including you.' The dream shifts to an Italian-style coffee pot boiling on a stove, its steam gradually filling the screen. From this image the narrative moves to a young woman clutching the pot and running. Across lawns and down cobbled streets she sprints in a bizarre, epic marathon before arriving at an assembled group - Lynch among them - holding out their empty cups.
 
Does this work make sense? Not really, but then dreams rarely do. It took six months of intensive labour for Lynch to turn these dreams into flesh, some of the work being undertaken in Paris, aptly the home of the surrealists. 'In some ways these are narratives based on an example of the unconscious process and how connected we are', Lynch says of this work. He is intrigued by the ways in which casual, social interactions in the real world resurface in the subconscious.
 
Lynch was born in 1974 and graduated from the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne in 1996. He has exhibited widely, garnering a powerful reputation as a leader in animated work, but also becoming renowned for his drawings and installations. He exhibited his series of drawings 'Untitled Sunset Strip', 2002, in the large group exhibition, '2004: Australian Culture Now', at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, inspiring curator Charlotte Day to write:

Lynch's intense, handmade drawings, paintings, animations and installations create a kind of conduit between the everyday and our fantasy lives. The 'Untitled Sunset Strip' drawings of closed roller-doors, long brick walls and boarded-up buildings show a city that is shut down and seemingly impenetrable. Here the empty city becomes a stage for the projection of our fantasies. The artist's recent series of animations are illustrated versions of some ordinary and other more intimate dreams that his family and close friends have had in which he appears. If it is true that it is only in dreams that we encounter our real desires, then these animations may be more representative of our reality than life itself. Dream on.
 
The interconnection between individuals has been an ongoing theme in Lynch's work. He has worked closely with artists such as Sharon Goodwin and Amanda Marburg in the performance collective DAMP, and has also been associated with Geoff Lowe and Jacqui Riva's artists' group, A Constructed World. Both collectives undermined the myth of the lone, heroic artist. DAMP, in particular, questioned the relationship between art and audience. In 1997 Lynch helped form Rubik, an artists' collective with Julia Gorman, Andrew McQualter and Ricky Swallow, based on the model of a record label or fanzine. The aim of the collective was to seek out alternative audiences and means of distribution of artists' work through the production of books and the staging of events. 'As much as we might be in denial about it, we are all born into groups', says Lynch. 'The first is family. It's those unconscious groupings that lead to a lot of this stuff.'
 
Video as a medium has grown in stature internationally over the last decade with video artists such as William Kentridge, Matthew Barney and Bill Viola now enjoying high profiles. Like Kentridge, Lynch combines the medium of video with imagery drawn or painted by hand. Lynch turned to video after studying painting. He says:

In the ten years since art school the whole discourse of video has changed. People like David Rosetzky and David Noonan, to cite two Australian examples, have taken it in highly sophisticated directions. As a medium it has grown up in a technical sense. I've always worked in series. I showed a series of streetscapes at the National Gallery of Victoria [in Melbourne] that were not unlike still frames, and that has led to things like [my more recent work]. It's kind of experiential. They're all drawings of friends or colleagues ... dumped into a video program. I like throwing in different textures, drawings, photo stills, texta and pencil, watercolour and sepia tones. It's not what you would call 'straight' animation. I could have done four stills each second to make it flow, but one still per second gives it a fractured quality. I'm more interested in what's not there, in forgetting.
 
It is in these gaps that Lynch's animations succeed. He avoids the usual clichés of dream depiction. Rather, his netherworld is a fairly down-to-earth place, exemplified by his animated video Mick's earliest memory, 2004, in which Lynch is depicted in a rural setting dressed in overalls and raking hay. Time is slowed down in this world, made sleepy and hazy. Remembering dreams is a hazardous process at the best of times, and the strange stop-start slowness of Lynch's work captures a degree of uncertainty. Says Lynch: 'Society is repressed in a lot of ways. My work is trying to deal with that, with those unconscious connections.'
 
 
 
James Lynch is represented by Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Mori Gallery, Sydney, and Galerie Frank, Paris.
 
Ashley Crawford