Wednesday – Sunday: 11:00a.m. – 5:00p.m.
Surrealism has always been a movement of transformation—of thought, of form, of perception. Born in the wake of World War I, the movement emerged as both a rebellion and a revelation: an effort to unlock the unconscious mind and expose the hidden logic beneath our waking world. Artists such as Man Ray, Joan Miró, André Masson, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí expanded the limits of what art could reveal, crafting dreamlike images that questioned not only what we see, but how we see.
Ctrl+Alt+Dream: Surrealism Then and Now reexamines this revolutionary impulse through a contemporary lens. The exhibition brings historic works from the Castellani Art Museum’s permanent collection into dialogue with digital artworks created through artificial intelligence. Despite the century that separates brushstroke from algorithm, these artists—past and present—share a common pursuit: to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.
As viewers move through the exhibition, they encounter the evolution of surrealism as both a practice and a philosophy. The analog dreamscapes of early surrealists find resonance in Laura Rankin’s 1980s drawing Man, Woman, Dog, Bird, Banana in a Room, a surreal psychological interior that anticipates today’s digitally constructed realities. Rankin’s work serves as a bridge between the tactile and the virtual, reminding us that surrealism is less a historical style than a persistent way of seeing—one that transcends time, technology, and medium.
In the digital age, this lineage extends into the realm of machine learning and text-to-image generation. Contemporary artists such as Inge Schuster (Denmark) and David Szauder (Hungary) use platforms like DALL·E and Midjourney to transform written language into visual experience. Their AI-generated works harness algorithms as collaborators, exploring the intersection of human imagination and machine interpretation. What once was automatic drawing has become algorithmic dreaming—a new form of surrealist automatism for the 21st century.
Through painting, photography, and digital projection, Ctrl+Alt+Dream asks viewers to reconsider the nature of creativity itself. Can a machine dream? Can code capture emotion, memory, or desire? These questions are not only technological—they are deeply human. The dialogue between traditional surrealists and today’s digital visionaries reveals that our search for meaning through the irrational endures, even as our tools evolve.
Artwork: Laura Rankin, Man, Woman, Dog, Bird, Banana in a Room, n.d. pastel with pencil
