J Davies — Maybe Our Dreams Are Real
26 June 2025 — 27 July 2025
J Davies, Maybe Our Dreams Are Real, 2025.
Drifting between memory and make-believe, Maybe Our Dreams Are Real poses a question about reality and surreality: are we truly awake, or dreaming with our eyes open?
Working exclusively with 35mm and Polaroid film, J Davies presents a body of work that resists digital intervention. Each image is unedited—raw, tactile, and embedded with the imperfections of lived experience. Light leaks, surreal colours, and layered double exposures disrupt the expected, creating dreamscapes where time and identity blur.
The installation unfolds like a cinematic constellation—non-linear, open-ended. Pinned directly to the wall, the photographs map the artist’s inner world: a tangle of timelines, textures, and touch. These aren’t just moments captured; they are moments felt, inviting viewers to slip between what is remembered and what is imagined.
Each image, a threshold left ajar, balances intimacy and isolation, fact and fabrication. The work is proudly queer, sexually charged, and emotionally raw—drawing on unexhibited Polaroids from the artist’s private archive to build an atmosphere thick with longing, connection, and play.
Untethered from sequence yet bound by spirit, Maybe Our Dreams Are Real moves like poetry—a dance between memory and possibility. Here, reality dissolves. Dreams take shape. And if we stay still long enough, we might find ourselves somewhere in between.
Catalogue
View full catalogue (PDF)
J Davies (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary takatāpui artist respectfully doing mahi on the stolen lands of the Kulin Nation in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). Through an ongoing archive of contemporary queer existence, J cultivates connection to community and culture while exploring themes of identity, intimacy, and neurodiversity.
With a deeply personal approach, J documents their own life behind closed doors, inviting audiences to consider how we view and value intimacy. Their work reflects a fluid relationship with time and memory— an experience shaped by their 2021 diagnosis of a processing disorder, which illuminated challenges in distinguishing dreams from reality. This exploration culminated in their 2022 book, Half of My Whole Life Was Just a Dream, a meditation on consciousness and recollection.
J’s work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Hong Kong International Photography Festival, The Centre for Contemporary Photography and Photo 2022/2024. They have been an artist in residence at Collingwood Yards and LCI Melbourne and a finalist for both the Bowness Photography Prize and the National Photographic Portrait Prize. J is represented by James Makin Gallery in Collingwood.
Exhibition Opening
Thursday 26 June, 2025
6pm-8pm
[link to Event page]