Patrick Pound: Dream Vitrine

Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham

17 May - 16 November 2025

Imagine if artworks could dream. In Dream Vitrine, artist and collector Patrick Pound reimagines selected pieces from the Wollongong Art Gallery collection as ‘sleeping objects’, wondering what dreams might arise within them. A painting of the sky might envision endless blue expanses, while a historic watercolour of flames might produce visions of fire’s flickering allure and menace. Max Dupain’s famous photograph of the sleeping sunbaker might dream of jigsaw puzzle boxes full of found photographs of beachcombers.

Each cabinet in Dream Vitrine displays a work alongside its imagined dream, creating surprising alignments and playful juxtapositions. Rich in surreal and sentimental connections, Pound invites us to daydream and consider how these artworks and artefacts, like dreamers, wander into realms unknown.

Extending the ideas of Patrick Pound’s exhibition Dream Vitrine is Windows, the second in a series of solo artist projects selected for the Gallery’s exterior panels – once a set of windows lining the building’s facade.

Each of the windows pictured here are images lifted from a single category in Pound’s vast collection of 70,000 found photographs. First collated for a photobook and never- before publicly exhibited, the selected photographs feature a window seen from the outside. We are allowed to look through them and see ghostly figures and happy families; actors acting, and everyday folks acting up; we see real and imagined worlds.

With each image reproduced to echo and reinstate the building’s ghostly past, we look through other people’s photographs and other people’s windows. Here, Pound reminds us that the photograph is a window posing as a mirror.

Commissioned and presented by Wollongong Art Gallery.

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Image: Patrick Pound, Anonymous disbanded newspaper archive photograph, 2024, found photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Darren Knight Gallery.