AMPHI Gallery is pleased to present A Boat Made of Dreams, an exhibition curated by Robert Wilhite that brings together the work of three Los Angeles artists: Scott Grieger, Margaret Nielsen, and Axel Wilhite. Their works explore the terrain of the subconscious, that shifting border between dream and waking life. Each artist attempts to capture those fleeting, powerful moments when imagination and emotion overlap, when the familiar becomes strange and the unexpected presents itself on a mystical level.

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During the mid-1980s, Scott Grieger, painter, educator, and longtime chairman of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design, created a series of small, intimate, and mystical portraits of his East Melrose Avenue neighbors: punk musicians, drug addicts, and street people he befriended and gained the trust of. These faces, detached from their bodies and surrounded by fields of color, float like dream fragments. Grieger described them as “the masks that the individuals wore and hid behind,” allowing them to become who they imagined themselves to be. His paintings reveal both the confidence and the insecurity of his young subjects, at once real and unreal, awake and dreaming.

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Margaret Nielsen, a Los Angeles painter born in Edmonton, Canada, and trained at the Chouinard Institute in the 1970s, has long blurred the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Exhibiting with the Asher Faure Gallery and later at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Nielsen’s work plays with transformation: waterfalls spill from one picture into another, canoes drift in midair, and a snake hovers above. As Thomas W. Rhoads, executive director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, observed, “Nielsen employs a variety of iconographic and stylistic means to confound the relationship between image and object, fantasy and reality, nature and culture.” Her paintings, reminiscent of both René Magritte and Albert Bierstadt, open a private realm where elemental forces—fire, water, earth, and air—become sources of mystery, humor, and revelation.

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The third artist in A Boat Made of Dreams is Axel Wilhite, whose imagery comes directly from his dreams. He wakes in the night to record them—notes, sketches, flashes of color, and shapes—and later transforms these fragments into visual reflections that capture both the story and the mood of the dream. Wilhite approaches his dreams with sincerity and insight, believing that these nocturnal visions hold truths about the psyche that waking logic cannot express. In addition to his studio work, Wilhite is the publisher of the online arts publication 7x7.LA and was curator and co-director of the now-defunct Space Ten Gallery in Hawthorne, California.

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Together, Grieger, Nielsen, and Wilhite offer entry into parallel realms, spaces where the conscious and unconscious meet. A Boat Made of Dreams invites viewers to move through these interior landscapes, to encounter the masks, symbols, and sensations that live just beneath the surface of thought.