Art Inspired by Neil Young Album | David Lunney, Chrome Dreams Pallas Projects + Studios, Dublin, 5 April 2018 – 14 April 2018

Chrome Dreams by David Lunney

Can "chrome dreams" become real?

Read about how integral the frame is for the painting, photograph and sculpture of artist David Lunney, and why he's taking inspiration from a bootleg Neil Young album.

From David Lunney, Chrome Dreams | Pallas Projects + Studios, Dublin, 5 April 2018 – 14 April 2018 in CIRCA Art Magazine (CIRCA is an online magazine publishing reviews, essays and projects around the theory and practice of contemporary art in Ireland) by Aidan Kelly Murphy:

Chrome Dreams is the name given to a semi-fictional Neil Young album from 1977 that was finished but, according to lore, never released.

Young shelved it as he shifted direction and released another album. In the intervening decades this collection of songs has taken on mythological qualities far exceeding the individual merits of the songs; exiting the realm of truth into urban myth, new additional layers to the story have kept on developing. Some have said that an acetate version of the album was bootlegged and even included a booklet, others have dismissed these physical manifestations of the album as baseless rumours. Others still assert that Chrome Dreams is merely the name incorrectly attributed to a collection of recordings that were not released, but that these songs were later re-recorded in different styles and included on subsequent albums. Young himself played off the stories by releasing Chrome Dreams II in 2007. The clearest explanation he has given of Chrome Dreams is as follows:

“What Chrome Dreams really was, was a sketch that Briggs drew of a grille and front of a ’55 Chrysler, and if you turned it on its end, it was this beautiful chick…I called it Chrome Dreams.”

In essence Chrome Dreams is either a snapshot in time of something, a distinctive view that can later be replicated, albeit with a different take or viewpoint, or simply a fantasy state of mind that never existed. It is also the name that David Lunney has chosen for the opening show of Pallas Projects + Studios’ new series of short shows under the banner of ‘Artist-Initiated Projects’. Lunney plays on the mythology and the conflicting views of what Chrome Dreams is, reappropriating it for his latest body of work, which itself is an alternative view of the landscapes of the Dublin and Wicklow mountains. On a base level there are parallels with the reflective nature of the grille described by Young and the apparatuses Lunney uses to create his work. His practice, one which he himself describes as “undertaking [a number] of protracted art processes”, sees the artist create devices which he then brings to the Dublin and Wicklow mountains to photograph the landscape. These images are later rendered in paint or edited as photographs. The creation of these devices, which include mounts for cameras, is a protracted process in itself, with Lunney constructing each bespoke device from scratch in his studio.

Chrome Dreams by David Lunney

Chrome Dreams begins with a sculpture which is based around a sheet of ArtGlass™. This completely clear glass acts an invisible platform for a variety of reflective elements. This portable sculpture was brought to a forest in Ballyedmonduff (Dublin Mountains) where it was photographed in a variety of positions. Two of these photographs have been rendered as drawings. These strange and complex drawings are always the goal of this process; in a sense of reverse-engineering the imagery from the initial sculpture.

Full article David Lunney, Chrome Dreams | Pallas Projects + Studios, Dublin, 5 April 2018 – 14 April 2018 in CIRCA Art Magazine (CIRCA is an online magazine publishing reviews, essays and projects around the theory and practice of contemporary art in Ireland) by Aidan Kelly Murphy.

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