Underground gallery becomes a dream vault – The Crypt, St Pancras, London

*Sigmund Freud. Image courtesy learnodo-newtonic.com.*

Curator Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro proposes the Crypt Gallery beneath St Pancras Church as the site of a “collective dream” for 20 artists, who will use a variety of mediums (no pun intended) to explore the dimensions between art and the subconscious mind. ‘Live in your dreams’ will be on from 27 February – 3 March 2014, with a private view the evening of 26 February 2014.

“A place for the darkest fantasies and strangest reveries”

Over 550 people will be in attendance before the doors open at ‘Live in your dreams’, an upcoming show at The Crypt Gallery in Euston. That is, the crypt under St Pancras Church, now used as a contemporary art gallery, is still home to the buried remains of its original inhabitants.

But don’t worry; you won’t see or hear from The Crypt’s half-thousand sleepers as 20 artists appropriate the space and furnish it with the stuff of fantasy, nightmares, or daydreams, all manifested through the range of art practice, from the physical, such as drawing and sculpture, to the more ethereal experience of performance and sound.

*St Pancras Church, Somers Town, Euston Square, 1880. Image courtesy antiquaprintgallery.com*

In this unusual show, curator Stephane Verlet-Bottéro hopes to “make room for irrationality and imagination by reversing the order” of the busy city above, one that is “obsessed with rational efficacy and unfaltering productivity.”

This exhibition, Verlet-Bottéro continues, will reflect “a manifold relationship between dreaming and artistic practice [through] a variety of strategies ranging from raw extract of dream memories to lateral analysis of the unconscious process.”