In Directed Dreaming, the McCoys present four new sculptures that use movement to explore anxiety. The title of the exhibit refers to practice of willing oneself to dream about specific situations in order to resolve conflicts in one’s waking life. The works in Directed Dreaming fuse cinematic, personal, and historical images to become visual records of those conflicts, with the question of resolution left open to the viewer.

The McCoys’ sculptures are fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and moving sculptural elements. Camera views are sequenced to create live cinematic events. By exposing the image making apparatus along with the projected results, the work explores both time-based and physical reality.

The two major sculptures in this show expand on the McCoys’ 2004 installation Our Second Date by further exploring the artists personal history, fantasies, and memories. Second Date incorporated miniature models of Jennifer and Kevin intercut with views of a meticulously crafted miniature scene from Godard’s Weekend. The works in Directed Dreaming splinter the couple’s shared autobiography.

In Double Fantasy II (sex), the McCoys represent themselves as nine year olds, drawing on a child’s scant sexual understanding to generate fantasies of their adult selves. With this technique they each reach back to a time when their ideas about love and sex were created from an amalgam of observations from television, popular culture and playground gossip that was hopelessly far from reality. In that these sources provide only the broadest of gestures, Double Fantasy II is an autobiographical take on the importance of genre. Formally, the work is a two-sided sculpture containing miniature film sets that fragment and isolate bodies at once fetishized and romanticized. The images captured by the tiny cameras cut together quickly to form a stream of consciousness meditation on the elusive subject of nascent sexuality and childhood imagination.

In Dream Sequence, the McCoys examine how sleep becomes a filter through which objective reality becomes fantasy . The work consists of a two-sided, 3 feet in diameter revolving circle, each side corresponding to the dream world of one of the artists. Using an obsolete trick of early cinema, a partially reflective mirror superimposes the sleeping artists against mutating landscapes. The resulting double projection physicalizes the dream worlds of each artist’s psyche. Kevin sees a helicopter unloading soldiers in a bleak landscape. Jennifer dreams of floods that segue into suburban resort swimming pools. The artists abandon the cinematic idea of editing with its jarring ruptures and discontinuities and instead set in motion a fluid self-sustaining world in front of the camera and in front of the viewer.

Included in the show are two wall mounted sculptures from the Clouds series that explore the vocabulary of a unending one shot film. In Clouds 9 and Clouds 10, cameras are trained on moving cloud formations to create suggestions of unknowable and yet moving and possibly ominous events.