Opens Sat 7 March, 2-4pm. To 26 April 2026. Friday-Sunday, 10am-2pm. WAYOUT Artspace, 71 Angus St, Kandos.
Independent group show of regional artists. Auspiced by Arts OutWest. Curated by Steven Cavanagh and Nicola Mason.
Domestic Dreams is an exhibition that explores the home as both a physical environment and a psychological landscape shaped by longing, memory, and imagination. The exhibition brings together artists working across multi-media to investigate how domestic environments operate. While domestic spaces are often associated with routine and stability, they are equally places where dreams, both literal and metaphorical, take root. Homes are the sites where desires are nurtured, fears are confronted, and fantasies unfold, making the domestic a fertile terrain for creative and critical exploration.
Domestic environments hold the potential to nurture imagination, offering settings where ideas can be tested, reshaped, and brought to life. Home is often imagined as a place of rest and routine or a fertile site for creativity. An environment providing the rhythms, textures, and atmospheres that enable creative thought. Revealing to us a more fragile and intimate kind of existence, where experience is both political and personal.
Manifestations of the so-called ‘dream home’ asks us: whose dreams are fulfilled by the structures of domesticity, and whose dreams are excluded or deferred? Domestic spaces are never entirely stable. They are shaped as much by inner states of mind as by physical walls. For some, the domestic represents gendered and routine divisions of labour. Spaces for reliable hierarchies, where generational futures can be imagined and played out. For others, it is a site of unrealised aspiration and confinement or diasporic experiences that span geographies, memories, and the weight of inherited traditions.
Domestic Dreams expands the conversation around home beyond the practical and into the imaginative. Familiar yet estranged, it reveals the domestic as a place of contradiction. Where aspirations of comfort and belonging meet the dreams that shape how we live, how we love, and how we imagine our futures.
In coordinating a large group of Central West artists for this proposed exhibition, Steven Cavanah and Nic Mason are valuing perspectives and voices from artists with diverse backgrounds and/or lived experiences.
Artists
Alejandro Alverez-Mendez – Bathurst
Laura Baker – Blayney
Tom Buckland – Canberra
Spencer Calveley – Perthville
Steven Cavanagh – Hill End
Jaq Davies – Orange
Rebecca Dowling – Cowra
Heather Dunn – O’Connell
Chelsea Fielding – Bathurst
June Golland – Bathurst
Brett Groves – Lithgow
Greg Hill – Sofala
Nic Mason – Napoleon Reef
Fleur McDonald – Kandos
Shani Nottingham – Cowra
Brett Nutting – Kandos
Lucy Smith – Bathurst
Bridget Thomas – Sofala
Andrew Regan – Orange
Ronda Sharpe – Parkes
Julie Visible – Lithgow
Leanne Wicks – Bogee
Jaiden Rutter – Kandos
Jay Elwell-Cook – Portland
Image:
Tom Buckland
Home Invader, 2017 – 2022
Cardboard, silicone, found objects, acrylic paint, found footage
100cm x 150cm x 150cm