Irrational Objects: Backwards Into the Future

Irrational Objects: Backwards Into the Future takes its inspiration from the many fantastical and utterly illogical objects created by the Dadaists and Surrealists in the opening decades of the 20th century. The concept behind the exhibition is two-fold: using the ideas and methods of the original Dadaists and Surrealists as a roadmap of sorts, the exhibit seeks to pay homage to the world that these iconoclastic artists conjured while also presenting something timely and relevant that speaks to our current age and circumstances. Irrational Objects: Backwards Into the Future is in part, about making the connections between what was and what is in hopes of reaffirming the continued relevance of the Dadaist-Surrealist ideologies.

Like many movements birthed in reaction to WWI, the Dadaist-Surrealists sought to reassess, rethink, and reconfigure the way that we thought and perceived the world around us and within us. The discord and upheaval that culminated in the horrors and devastation of the Great War served to many as a call for change. Rationalism and the ‘ordered’ world that had spawn from it had brought much of humanity to the brink, so perhaps the way forward was, in a manner of speaking, to embrace a far less rational world.

By changing our relationship with our unconscious mind – where our fears and desires manifest themselves unfettered – and by changing our fundamental perception and logical associations, there existed the possibility to revolutionize human experience.

Much of what the artists hope to achieve is what the original Surrealists sought to accomplish; providing a vehicle and a methodology to obtain a new sort of inner-liberation, a superior reality: surreality. Additionally, given that Dadaism-Surrealism makes ample use of the absurd, the unexpected and the uncanny, it is their hope that Irrational Objects: Backwards Into the Future will serve to, in a thoughtful manner, entertain and amuse those who experience the installation.