Exhibit Guide
June 20th – June 27th
Duration: Approx 20–25 minutes
Chasing a Dream is an immersive installation by Teddy Georgia, Sonny Martinez, and Joaquin Soto that traces the journey of a dream realized through cycles of transformation, memory, death, and renewal. Follow the thread of fabric as it leads you through spaces of birth, labor, transition, and realization, revealing that the dream and the dreamer are inseparable.
Before You Begin
How to Experience the Installation
Move at your own pace.
Follow the blue fabric throughout the building.
Listen to your audio guide through the provided headset.
Some spaces invite contemplation while others invite participation.
There is no "correct" interpretation.
Sound as Companion
Throughout your journey, you are invited to experience Chasing a Dream through sound as well as space.
Upon entering the installation, you will receive a headset containing a custom soundscape created specifically for this experience. The audio is designed to accompany your movement through the exhibition, weaving together ambient textures, music, and narrative elements that reflect the themes of transformation, memory, and becoming.
Rather than explaining what you see, the soundscape offers another pathway into the work. It functions as a companion, encouraging reflection, imagination, and presence as you move between environments.
Using Your Headset
Please put on your headset before beginning the installation.
Follow the blue fabric as it guides you through each stage of the experience.
Move at a pace that feels natural to you.
The audio will continue throughout your journey and is intended to be experienced in its entirety.
When you have completed the installation, please return your headset to a staff member.
As you listen, allow the sounds to blend with the spaces around you. There is no right way to experience the work. Follow your curiosity, remain present, and let the journey unfold.
The Journey
Birth & Community – Sculpture Garden
Every dream begins with a spark. Before it becomes a vision, a goal, or a destination, it exists as possibility.
Your journey begins here, among a series of wooden arches that guide you away from the familiar world and into a space of transformation. As you move forward, notice the fabric that winds throughout the installation. This thread serves as both pathway and lifeline, connecting each stage of the experience and inviting you deeper into the dream.
Suspended from the surrounding trees are handcrafted piñatas created in collaboration with members of the community. These vibrant forms represent childhood wonder, collective memory, and the people who shape us long before we understand who we are becoming. Like dreams themselves, they are fragile vessels filled with possibility.
This opening environment celebrates beginnings: birth, imagination, connection, and the communities that nurture our earliest aspirations. Before every dream is realized, it is first held by others. Here, the dream takes its first breath.
The Root: Death & Rebirth – The Underground Gallery
To dream is to change.
Follow the fabric below ground into The Root, a space devoted to transformation. Here, the dream descends beneath the surface, into the unseen places where growth begins. Like roots stretching through soil, this stage of the journey explores the labor, uncertainty, and surrender required to bring a dream to life.
Within the Community Gallery, works by invited artists reflect the many forms that labor can take. Through sculpture, image, sound, and story, these works honor the acts of making, rebuilding, questioning, and persisting that shape every creative journey.
At the heart of this space is the Flower Room, a lush subterranean garden where death is reimagined not as an ending, but as a necessary part of renewal. Surrounded by flowers, greenery, and decay, visitors are invited to consider what must be released in order for something new to emerge. Here, loss becomes nourishment. Endings become beginnings.
The Root reminds us that every dream is transformed by what it encounters. Before it can be realized, it must first pass through the darkness, carrying with it the seeds of its own becoming.
The Dream Realized –The Sanctuary
Emerging from The Root, visitors enter a space suspended between reality and imagination.
The Sanctuary represents the moment of realization. Not the end of the journey, but the moment when a dream becomes visible. Surrounded by darkness, mist, light, and living forms, familiar boundaries begin to dissolve. The floor disappears beneath a blanket of fog. Laser lines cut through the haze with startling clarity. Above, suspended flora hover between earth and sky, growth and stillness.
At the center of the space stands the altar.
Traditionally, an altar is a place of worship, offering, or remembrance. In Chasing a Dream, the altar becomes something else: a place of realization. It marks the moment when vision takes form, when imagination crosses into existence, and when the dream reveals itself to the dreamer.
Yet realization is not arrival. The dream is not a destination waiting at the end of the path. It is a living process, shaped by every step that came before it and every step that follows. As you move through the Sanctuary, consider the dreams that have carried you here, the dreams you are still becoming, and the possibility that the dream and the dreamer have never truly been separate.
Before returning to the world outside, take a moment to pause within the mist. Listen. Reflect. Notice what remains.
About the Artists
Chasing a Dream emerged through a shared exploration of memory, transformation, and collective imagination, combining sculpture, sound, installation, and environmental design into a single immersive experience.
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Georgia is a musical and textile artist whose practice runs the gamut from multimedia installations and experimental sound art, to live performance and art-pop. Her work invites audiences to be active participants in a mutually beneficial exchange, where the artwork is a vessel passing energy between viewer and environment. This ethic of exchange informs her material choices as well, favoring discarded construction remnants and found fabrics over new materials, infusing works with the cyclical spirit of reciprocity.
Georgia has composed and produced music for film and interdisciplinary projects, including immersive sound and textile installations for the Meow Wolf art collective’s permanent exhibition, and for the forest paths at the Texas-based annual art-in-situ event Midnight In Nowhere. Alongside her installation practice, she is an active touring musician, having performed across North America, Europe, and the UK since 2015, and frequently collaborates with visual and performance artists across disciplines. Through sound and texture, she creates communal art experiences with the hope of sparking reverent listening and guttural joy.
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Sonny is a filmmaker and photographer born and raised in Oak Cliff, Texas. Martinez has lived and produced work in Chicago, New York, and Dallas. Martinez’s work breeds intimate moments from a Queer Chicano lens. Christopher Sonny Martinez was Art's Mission Oak Cliff's first 2021 Artist-in-Residence, ACRE’s 2018 Artist-in-Residence, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
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The dream started in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I was born in a rich cultural city known for mariachi and tequila. My family immigrated to the U.S. when I was seven, and I struggled to adapt to a new language and traditions. By the end of high school, I graduated from Grand Prairie High with a clearer path ahead. I then attended Mountain View Community College, where I reignited my passion for art and entered the art world. This groundwork prepared me to make significant progress, leading to my transfer to the University of North Texas. There, I majored in Visual Arts Studies and earned my art education certification. At UNT, I focused on gaining experiences and connections, spending countless hours in the studio.
My curiosity has helped me discover my style and technique through constant experimentation. This struggle continues today. Thanks to my father, I learned how to use tools early on, spending breaks remodeling homes with him. This taught me to push my limits with the right tools. Operating various tools shown me that anything is possible with the right knowledge and equipment. My work reflects years of training and perfecting my craft. My goal is to keep learning new techniques and materials. I prefer scrap metal because welding and crafting from repurposed materials is therapeutic. I am drawn to the colors, rust, dents, and scratches on metal, as they carry history that I reshape into something new with each weld or cut.
Currently I’m fortunate to share my knowledge by teaching metal art classes at the Creative Arts Center of Dallas. A staple of East Dallas for the last 60 years.
Contributing Artists
This exhibit also features the work of contributing artists:
Alvaro Arróliga | Clean as Paper | Eduardo Garcia | Ashley Stuart | Christian Vasquez | Daniel Yáñez
After the Journey
Chasing a Dream explores the spaces between becoming and being, between imagination and realization. Through fabric, sound, sculpture, movement, and community participation, the installation traces a path through birth, labor, transformation, and renewal.
Yet dreams are rarely fixed destinations. They evolve as we evolve. They ask us to release old versions of ourselves, to embrace uncertainty, and to remain open to what is possible.
As you leave this experience, we invite you to reflect on the dreams that have shaped your life, the ones you are actively building, and the ones still waiting to be discovered.
Thank you for joining us on this journey.
Acknowledgement
Chasing a Dream is made possible with the support of the The City of Dallas Office of Arts & Culture, Texas Commission on the Arts, and Comerica Charitable Giving.
Thank you.