The Project Space

The Dreamer Awakes

Press release:

Ron Gonzalez: The Dreamer Awakes

I am making a bed and filling in the bed space. Their skeletal grid bed frames create a place for found reality. They have an intimate scale that is characterized by time worn emphatic objects that serve as bodily surrogates. The beds have a distinct air of nostalgia and ruin and are encrypted with personal experiences as staged sites functioning as tomb furniture with anthropomorphic overtones and childhood allegorical memories of loss. They hold small books, old cars, and abject narrative objects that are laid bare and bound to their beds with wire. Their condition of physical dissolution emphasizes their range of distress and arrested limbo status as bric-a-brac dream beds of a dreamer’s private world where objects find new meaning. The bed as an object emulates the human form. It is a defined space, it's a place of death and bringing back to life.

Ronald Mario Gonzalez is a contemporary sculptor and installation artist known for generating innovative bodies of work that explore the intersection between found objects and figuration. At the core of the artist's practice is a complex fusion of time worn and abject materials that blend personal memories with an archaeology of past objects into proliferations of mournful and evocative heads, figures, and assemblages. Since the mid-seventies the artist has created elegiac sculptures and installations that are embodiments of mortality, memory, and survival, combining elements of both assemblage and bricolage, remaking dated leftovers at hand in a process of dissolution and renewal. Always working in anthropomorphized serial form, the works feature permutations of materials, scale, color, and texture, giving degraded materials human status and presence through improvisation and craft. Gonzalez’s restless investigation of animating materials has produced a disquieting sculptural universe with expressive distressed elements that serve as an existential grounding for representing the human condition.