An installation view of “Seat of Dreams,” a collaborative work by Hannah Dwertman, Samantha daSilva, Emily Quinn Loughlin and Caitlyn Barhorst (photo by Geoff Wichert)

The cover of a chaise lounge looks more like a painter’s canvas than an invitation to lie down. One plant shades it, but another grows right through it. Yet it appears someone has succeeded in drowsing here, and further that whatever troubled their sleep has left a record: impressions of wear and tear on their unruly bed. Some are as inchoate as unconsciousness would imply: rudiments among the darkness. Here and there, however, an image that formed, however distorted, however incomplete, somehow remains as a challenge for the conscious mind to decipher. One of them, a black-and-white image of an urban building, is surrounded by a crowd of agitated people, while what disturbs them is unclear — unless it’s the cloud-like form that appears to be devouring them. Hanging from the roof of the building, a colorful giant in a floral print dress gapes over her shoulder at what’s happening below.

There’s very little daylight between dreaming and making art. Most dreamers report having their dreams take visual form, which means their sleeping brains are reassembling fragments of visual memory just as artists do when drawing spontaneously. They also often claim that the original idea came to them in a dream. Robert Olen Butler argues in his book on creativity, From Where You Dream, that learning to create while awake is learning to carry over dreaming into consciousness. These four accomplished artists in Finch Lanes’s Dream States have joined forces to show together some individual works that draw on dreams and to collaborate … to dream together.

“What We See and What We Don’t See” by Hannah Dwertman

Surrealism was anchored in dreams, which for the Surrealists was seen as a way into the subconscious or preconscious mind. One of its foremost figures, Max Ernst, frequently collaged cheaply produced, popular illustrations to eerie, dreamlike effect. Hannah Dwertman also favors found materials for her collages. Her major piece here is “galaxy gallery,” a video projection in which the art show and its visitors float in outer space while, in the nearest frame, a succession of images succeed each other as they march across the space. Her titles, like “What We See and What We Don’t See,” sometimes invoke philosophical ideas, and seem at other times to be intent on destabilizing reason.

“Romance” (left) and “Lasts Forever,” by Samantha daSilva

What Samantha daSilva’s labels paintings are not produced with brushes, nor do they primarily rely on arrangements of color. One of several artists today who travel widely to work and once there employ local materials, like distinctive soils, her panels, such as “Lasts Forever” and “Romance” are richly textured, almost bas reliefs, that may evoke local deserts or the surface of the moon. While they require dialing back certain expectations, they compensate by pleasing more than just the eyes. Their sensuous surfaces might be called “tactile visuals” — felt as much as seen through the eyes.

Emily Quinn Loughlin’s “Ether” employs an acrylic plastic construction to turn serpentine cutouts into a writhing, gravity-free sphere, in which inaccessible space and rhythmic shadows add to the dreamer’s sense of losing control, as if in a labyrinth where structure overcomes willpower. In the center of this small maelstrom, a surprising pair of commanding eyes looking back completes the effect.

Emily Quinn Loughlin’s “Ether”

Caitlyn Barhorst’s choice of cozy, familiar textile materials, typically associated with sweaters or rugs, challenges the artist to dematerialize the predictably cozy results. In “Counting Sheep,” Barhorst achieves this partly by collaging together a counterintuitive assortment of textures and grain patterns, which we would expect to be organized by the loom. The hank of wool that emerges from the center of this chaos bears more than a passing resemblance to cerebral convolutions. Barhorst reminds us that whatever the mind engages on the way to sleep (“counting sheep”) will go with us and be transformed in unpredictable ways — transformations made uncanny by our inability to tell when the real stops and dreaming begins.

A thought these four adroit conjurors call to mind: why are so many of our cultural references to dreams so positive, like “a dream come true” meaning good fortune, or “dream vacation” being something to desire? It’s not that every dream is a nightmare; it’s just that dreams are so often unsettling. But there we come full circle, to another quality art and dreams often share: the uncanny.

Caitlyn Borhorst’s “Counting Sheep”

Dream States, featuring Emily Quinn, Samantha daSilva, Caitlyn Barhorst, and Hannah Dwertman, Finch Lane Gallery, through Aug. 5.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.