Maybe Our Dreams Are Real, the latest exhibition by Melbourne-based artist J Davies, is now showing at Hillvale Gallery in Brunswick until 27 July 2025. This evocative body of work invites viewers into a delicate space where memory and imagination blur, urging us to question what is real and what might simply be dreamt.
Davies creates using only 35mm and Polaroid film, embracing the unpredictability of analogue processes. Light leaks, double exposures, and unexpected shifts in colour aren’t mistakes but essential collaborators in their practice — crafting images that feel raw, tactile, and vividly alive. Each photograph resists digital intervention, preserving the imperfections and textures of lived experience.
Installed directly on the gallery walls in a loose, non-linear constellation, the works unfold like fragments of thought or memory. Davies draws from private archives, including intimate Polaroids never before exhibited, to build a world thick with longing, queer desire, and tender vulnerability.
Through themes of identity, intimacy, and neurodiversity, Davies’ work explores how we hold time and memory. Their acclaimed 2022 book, Half of My Whole Life Was Just a Dream, meditates on the slippery edges of consciousness — a thread that continues here. The exhibition feels less like a straightforward narrative and more like poetry: open-ended, immersive, and quietly profound. These are not just moments captured, but moments deeply felt — inviting us to slip between what is remembered and what is imagined.
About the artist
J Davies (b. 1994) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia), working across photography, publication, and installation. Their practice explores themes of identity, intimacy, queer experience, and neurodiversity, often drawing from personal archives to create work that blurs the boundaries between memory and imagination.
Davies is known for their analogue approach, using 35mm and Polaroid film to produce images marked by imperfections — light leaks, surreal hues, and layered exposures — that reinforce a tactile, emotional connection to the act of remembering. Their 2022 book, Half of My Whole Life Was Just a Dream, reflects on how memory and consciousness intertwine, influenced by a diagnosis of a processing disorder that shapes how they experience time and dreams.
Davies’ work has been shown at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Hong Kong International Photography Festival, The Centre for Contemporary Photography, and PHOTO 2022 and 2024. They have been a finalist for the Bowness Photography Prize and the National Photographic Portrait Prize, and held residencies at Collingwood Yards and LCI Melbourne. Davies is represented by James Makin Gallery in Collingwood.
Exhibition details
Maybe Our Dreams Are Real
by J Davies
Hillvale Gallery, 43–45 Edward Street, Brunswick, VIC
Until 27 July 2025, Open Sunday to Friday, 11am–3pm
