Joe Maurer's current art show at the Pablo Center at the Confluence, "Animal Dreams: A Constellation," includes video and painted elements. (Photo by Andrea Paulseth)

The artwork featured in Joe Maurer’s current installation at the Pablo Center, “Animal Dreams: A Constellation,” marks a departure for the longtime Chippewa Valley artist – a detour, if you will, from the familiar rolling landscapes of Wisconsin into the roiling world of the unconscious mind.

Maurer – a landscape architect as well as a visual artist – says he’s long felt a sense of grief about changes to the landscape wrought by development and industrial farming. While he admits that he previously avoided using fantasy in his artwork, an exploration of Jungian analysis and its emphasis on the unconscious opened him to the possibility of a different approach to art.

“I’m curious about the relationship between changes in the land and dreams,” Maurer says. “The exhibit is meant to say ‘here are the results.’ ”

The exhibit, on display through Sept. 15, features both familiar and new styles for Maurer. Visitors are greeted with a series of impressionistic oil landscapes painted on-site at Wisconsin farms. Look closely, and you’ll see that the paint is atop a collage of old newspapers and book pages, including Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. These smaller paintings are paired with several large-scale – and more fantastic – murals, including “Dream of the City Rabbit,” which features hares and dinosaurs and was created with help from Jesse Blake Hay.

The latter mural is visible in the flickering light of a looping, 10-minutes video created by Maurer with the help of Robert Andruszkiewicz. It’s in the video that the fantastical underpinning of the show take flight. Maurer may have dreamed of animals, but here the animals are the dreamers, too.

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Dreams are a great thing to look at because they’re not directly saying ‘you should do this; and ‘this is bad or that’s good.’

JOE MAURER

ARTIST

The largely monochromatic menagerie, punctuated with Maurer’s own sound effects, is a dreamlike collection of animals domestic and exotic: An elephant weeps. A snoozing cat dreams of hunting deer. A coyote meets a butterfly, then dozes beneath dancing petroglyphs. Painted and drawn frames – Maurer estimates he made about 3,000 of them – are interspersed with a few real-world videos. The overall effect is mesmerizing, particularly when coupled with ambient background music by Jeremy Ylvisaker.

“I work on pretty heavy-duty material, so I can manipulate it,” Maurer said of the artwork he created for the video. Using a voice command on his iPhone, he would photograph a piece of art he had created by hand. Then he would modify the image by removing or adding paint, then take another photo. He often worked right after waking up, with his own dreams informing the artwork – blending the conscious and unconscious.

“In terms of my evolution as an artist,” Maurer said, “I’m much more comfortable leaving the work as a question than I am (saying), ‘This is what it is.’ That’s kind of where I came from: ‘We need to promote! We need to correct our behaviors!’ … I needed to take that load off of myself and let the dreams talk. Let the Earth speak. ‘Animals Dreams’ is us. We are also animals. We came out of the Earth. Even though we have all this technology, we’ve part of the Earth.”

During an opening reception on Aug. 9, the artwork was paired with recordings of interviews that Andruszkiewicz conducted with local farmers, who were asked to imagine what the rural landscape will look like in 10, 50, or 100 years.

“To summarize, it’s a balance between what do I want and what is happening in the world that I need to pay attention to,” he said. “Dreams are a great thing to look at because they’re not directly saying ‘you should do this; and ‘this is bad or that’s good.’ ”

In other words, art – and dreams – are subject to interpretation.

“Animal Dreams: A Constellation,” an exhibit by Joe Maurer • through Sept. 15 • Gibson Street Entrance, Pablo Center at the Confluence, 128 Graham Ave., Eau Claire