The Sleep of Reason
The Sleep of Reason is a solo show at Gallery 148. Through recollected memory, notes and details from a dream journal. I explore
the visual landscape of dreams, nightmares and other liminal states. Through drawings and paintings, this series decodes, collages and stitches the
content of these narratives into a surreal body of work.
The ritual of remembering my dreams is a challenging one. Involving that I repeat a mantra in my head over and over, “remember your dreams…” then waking up only to have a flash flood of fragmented imagery populate the senses before I completely forget that night’s dream. This fragmented flood of memories is both frustrating and fascinating.
In 2011 I started a journal to counteract this lapse in memory when it came to remembering my dreams. Each entry was focused on sight, sounds, feelings and actions. Down to whatever detail I can remember. Currently, it’s an ongoing project, with the purpose of exercising my ability of recall the events of a dream sequence. Concurrently, I also started a ongoing sketchbook project called The Vanity Book. This book was used as an opportunity to create an environment where I can play with free association and non-sequitur imagery based purely on reaction. The end result were these composition that filled every corner of the page, leaving absolutely no room for a formal composition. Yet in this noise, I was able to find a ritual that allowed me to expunge daily stress, personal demons and lock them into paper. Both the dream journal and the Vanity Book served a similar purpose. They documented an output, processed onto paper.
In The Sleep of Reason, both practices were married together to create a new product and a way for me to describe my dreams. The synthesis for this approach comes from Carl Jung, who suggests in his book, Man and His Symbols to not approach dreams symbolically, but to understand the content and context of a dream in a narrative. He states,
“Very often dreams have a definite, evidently purposeful structure, indicating an underlying idea or intention through, as a rule, the latter is not immediately comprehensible. I therefore began to consider whether one should pay more attention to the actual form and content of a dream, rather than allowing, “free” association to lead one off through a train of ideas to complexes that could as easily be reached by other means.”
This focus on content and narrative inspired me to drive my documentation towards a more empirical direction. For the past six years, I’ve been documenting my dreams, it’s narratives and its details. Building a library of my journey through liminal states, and understanding the themes, symbols and recurring motifs within my dreaming world. The Sleep of Reason takes an opportunity to present my findings after a six year excavation within my own subconsciousness.
The Skinwalkers
Boar Population
Basement Zombies
Turning into Stone
Skirmish
The Movie Trailer
Kaiju Dream
Shapeshifter
Leader
Barghest
Boy and Rabbits
Fire