Who Needs AI Dreamscapes When We Have Leonora Carrington?

Where do dreams come from? Questions about their origin are worth asking on occasion, especially when a sampling of the work of the prolific, late Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is on view at San Francisco’s Gallery Wendi Norris.

Even in a modern world filled with streams of amazing imagery coming from the likes of Disney, Studio Ghibli and AI-generated visuals, Carrington’s phantasms glow with illuminating persistence, emanating from a unique, focused and enduring intelligence. In the show Mythopoesis, on view through March 15, her work doesn’t simply present striking characters, it prompts cascades of thoughts about the very nature of dreaming.

Each artwork in this show — whether woven, carved, painted, or sketched — is rich in its own details and nuances, balancing the imaginary with the real. Alternate universes are populated by fantastic, half-familiar creatures who perform striking but just-recognizable rituals.

Picture the odd scene portrayed in the painting Sidhe, the White People of Tuatha dé Danann. Four ghostly humanoids circle a table as if sharing a small meal. Most guests are seated, but only on thick air. One rests on the back of a white goose, while another guest with a long white tail stands, juggling glowing white globes amid a vaporous cloud. A faint if full-bodied horse stares at the viewer, as if in a dream itself. The stark realism of colorful victuals on the table and a lively rooster wandering the floor emphasize the otherworldly quality of the rest of the surroundings.

Visions like this could be individually generated, springing full-blown from the artist’s mind and experiences. Or they may be drawn from a collective unconscious.

Surrealism as a movement set out to generate insights from the unconscious, from which dreams derive. Concepts by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung strongly influenced founding Surrealists in the early 20th century, when Carrington fled her oppressive bourgeois British family and sought self-exile in New York and Paris before settling in Mexico.

A cosmopolitan spirit in a pre-globalized world, and one of the few recognized female Surrealists, Carrington exemplified how a singular creative intelligence could re-channel mythic figures and narratives via personal reckonings. Her art reflects her status as a stranger in strange lands; she drew deeply from the myths and mysteries of cultures she was not born into, including from Celtic and pre-Columbian Mexican sources.

The dream-like figures showing up in force in Carrington’s work include creatures with human and animal qualities. They seem to have seeped through some supernatural portal, taking their places within stylized, built and natural worlds.

One dazzling tour de force is a large, untitled and boldly colored wool wall hanging of a boat and its passengers, co-created with the Rosales family of weavers. A version of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl appears as the dragon prow of the vessel, while two large masked creatures ride inside, one holding a dark orb before the figurehead, as if tempting it forward. Though one of the sailors possesses powerful human hands, beneath its mask lies a large flower head on a spindly green stalk.

The show’s most magnificent object is the wooden sculpture La cuna (The Cradle), created during Carrington’s early time in Mexico. No mere toy, the weight of the wood can be sensed in the carved vessel and the wave-form stand cradling it. On the boat’s sides, fantastic painted creatures parade. Noah’s ark-like, some disembark post-catastrophe, though darker figures imply catastrophes to come. Painted stages of the sun run in succession along one side, phases of the moon along the other — cosmological guidance for sea-going vessels, and other creatures too.

To create La cuna, Carrington worked alongside artist José Horna, who also co-crafted Rueda de los caballos. Here, eight colorful horses are frozen mid-canter around a wooden wheel, poised as if awaiting a spin to put them in motion. Rueda de los caballos recalls early moving picture technologies, another form of fantasy.

Carrington paid great attention to other creatures, most notably in her diverse representations of horses, lifelong avatars of self-identification. A striking horse takes center stage in the canvas Equinoxio, radiating layers of combined cosmic and the earthly imagery. Living creatures, celestial bodies and abstract figures overlap one another, hover upside-down, and surge toward or subside from easy view. These dense overlays suggest blurrings of time and space, a favorite Surrealist notion. Hovering above is a complex image of an eye-portal — an all-seeing universal access point to the cosmological infinite.

Such unusual specimens came out of Carrington’s idiosyncratic sensibility. She was dedicated to creating and channeling visions. Her images counter the machined dreams of AI: random, middling, surrealist-seeming results generated from an average of existing cultural products.

Carrington drew and transmuted distinct imagery from the reservoirs of her own subconscious, the collective well of cultural possibilities and the mysteries of the lands she found herself in. Her creative interventions remind and inspire, pointing not only to the sources of dreams but to how meaningful dreaming can be.

‘Mythopoesis’ is on view at Gallery Wendi Norris through March 15, 2025.