DREAM STONES
Picture
Book of Lunes (maquette) 1991. 9" x 5.5" x 5". Permanent Collection, Chicago Art Institute, Burning in Hell, curated by Nancy Spero.
"I have chosen the inner path of dreams, a path I have been folllowing for many years. Since earliest times, people have recorded dreams on tablets. In keeping with this tradition, I recorded my dreams in a series that I call Dream Stones." 
                                                                             —Donna Byars
Picture
Dream Stones / The Gifts, 1979-2007. Three tablets, 33" x 19" x 3"
Picture
Dream Stones, 1979. Seven tablets, 33" x 19" x 3". Wave Hill: The Artists View, Bronx NY
"The tablets, marked with a series of symbolic forms whose origins lie in the artist's own dreams, are highly personal in their final meaning. For the viewer, they should provoke questions and pose riddles, without possibility of any single resolution. This state of puzzlement, over the origin and history of this 'found' arrangement, will echo Byars' own fascination with legends of lost civilizations. More than any formal effect of structural logic, her work aims at the creation of a kind of aura, force-field, of mystery--one in which the intense specificity of the individual subconscious melds unpredictably with collective forms of symbolism." 
           
                                                                                                         —Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator of Art, Museum of Modern Art, NYC  
                                                                                                                                              Professor, Art History, New York University 
Each stone tablet is marked with a symbolic form that emerged from the artists' dream. She perceives the work as a kind of personal archeology, the viewer being forced to puzzle over and identify with the images as though discovering evidence of a lost civilization—a metaphor for the personal and collective unconscious."   
                                                          —Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, Pantheon Books, NY 1983