Flashback to March, 2012: I'll See You In My Dreams

I have extremely vivid dreams, and I started writing them down in 2007 so that I could analyze them.  It's become a daily practice of significance to me, and I'm beginning to realize that it's actually a very complex process of multifaceted translation between subconsciously experienced visual imagery and waking linguistic articulation--the imagery within dream reality is a translation of feelings and events I have accumulated while awake, and my writing it down is an additional layer of re-framing/ re-contextualizing in order to re-experience the same themes and emotions again, hopefully with a revelatory/ prophetic result.  Anyway, many people who know me know that this is a thing that I do, and I've had a lot of people ask me about how I might utilize what I call my dream archive in my work.  I'd never really thought of the dream archive as fodder for artmaking--it's mostly just something I do for me/ definitely not something I'd ever thought about sharing.  But late last February, when I was in a post-grad-school-application place--dissatisfied with what I'd been making, determined to figure out a way to do something else, something more personal, with a different kind of approach--the dream archive came to mind.

So, I started building a dome-like, cocoon-ish structure out of tracing paper and gel medium (using chicken wire to hold the form/ keep it suspended).

My original idea was to transcribe the dreams onto pieces of tracing paper and effectively build the dome out of my dreams (wouldn't it be pretty when all the colors from the pencils I was writing with ran together, thought I), but that was just insane as I had 5+ years worth of dreams to contend with, and I didn't want people crouching down to read inside of it anyway.  And the thing I built was so nice as it was in its pure translucence, especially once I put it in the white box of the installation room.  I took a bunch of photos, from different locations within the room/ in relation to the object, and with different light.  

I decided that a better way to incorporate the dream excerpts would be sound.  The room had a nice echo to it, so I sat inside the tracing paper coccoon inside the white cube, and I recorded myself reading excerpts from the dream archive.  I layered and repeated certain words and the recording picked up the natural echo of the space.

I included the installation in my 3/12/12 critique

Here's a nifty video I made using a selection of the still images combined with the audio that looped around it.

[For some annoying reason, blogger wouldn't let me upload the video directly, so I had to use YouTube as a middle man...Apologies for any resulting quality issues...]