Dawn is an exhibition combining fragmented figurative sculptures, altered objects taken from the home, projected video and ambient audio to create an environment that merges physical and psychological spaces. This exhibition uses my ongoing experiences with sleep paralysis and the entanglements produced by my nighttime adventures to situate the viewer in the liminal space that I regularly revisit. In Dawn, fragments of figurative self-replicas and fragments of a bedroom become screens for projected imagery that reflect the disorientated feelings associated with moments of transition. Window blinds disrupt projected video of dust floating in the light like stars and murmurations of birds passing through the trees in my backyard, obscuring the figure that lies behind the blinds in stripes of light shifting with time. Together in a space, these works are a lens through which I examine my mental state as a liminal space, like that experienced in a state of sleep paralysis.
Dawn creates a realm where the viewer can reconsider physical spaces as psychological ones. This exhibition combines four mixed pieces to create an installation that blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces.
When approaching the space, viewers can either enter form the right or the left side of the gallery. When entering from the right side of the gallery they are confronted with a bed standing upright with the headboard on the floor. On the surface of the bed attached at eye level are two feet, while two arms and shoulders lie at the bed’s headboard. The figure, or what is present of the figure, appears to be lying on its stomach in a slumber. Whether or not the figure’s absence is indicating its descendance into sleep or if its presence is implying an awakening is unclear; it is somewhere in-between. When viewers walk around to the back of the bed they experience the reveal of the projection on the back of the box spring.
When entering from the left side of the gallery viewers approach a set of three vinyl blinds, suspended in the space mimicking a household window. The blinds float next to one another, creating a large rectangular wall the resembles the scale of Law and Closure, which sits against the opposite wall. Video is projection mapped onto the set of three blinds, creating three individual projection screens that display three different videos, periodically coming together as one to from a singular video stretched across all three of the vinyl screens. The videos projected onto the blinds interchange between footage captured from within and outside of the walls of my bedroom. The projected imagery shifts scenes and colors, casting its light onto the blinds and traveling through them, surfacing the walls and the figure that lay on the other side with stripes of shifting light. Viewers can observe the blinds from either side, choosing to stand on the outside of the blinds and look in at the figure or to join the figure in the striped room.
In between the two mixed media installations sits a pile of figurative parts, apparently in the midst of either coming together or coming apart. Across from the figure is a photograph of the figure itself, at its best. Printed on fabric and delicately hanging from the ceiling, the photograph is the mirrored reflection of the pile. They face each other as familiars and as others. Their scale, material and existence take completely different forms, yet they are merely renditions of one another.
The show is tied together by the audio that plays at an elevator music level and serves to further allude to a mixed state of consciousness. All of these components of the show work together to create a space inspired by the moments I experience during sleep paralysis.
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
- Susan Sontang
Time's Relentless Melt
The source material for the projections Time’s Relentless Melt was video footage I made while in my bedroom and in my backyard, just on the other side of my bedroom window. I recorded floating specs of dust, illuminated by the afternoon light that passed through my bedroom window, settling slowly like constellations in the wake of night; a murmuration of birds that flew as individuals but traveled through the trees, well-choregraphed and with effortless precision, as if they were one; the early morning sun rays that passing through the peaks between the rooftops and the pines, abstracted by refractions when seen through my eyeglass lens. I edit these videos, enhancing the colors and slowing them down to heavily emphasize moments that otherwise pass by too quickly or go unnoticed. My alterations imbue the footage with a dream-like feeling of serenity, obscured by lens-shifting blurs.
In Threshold, I project onto the back of the vertical bed a compilation of footage that includes the rising sun seen through my eyeglass lens; a crystal object that dangles in the window; clouds passing each other at different rates, overlapping in their horizontal or vertical paths across the sheet; home videos that focus on a group of birds at the park; and a glass sphere, turning the world upside before disappearing into the sheet like a moon in the night sky. The video loops, starting again with the rising sun seen through my eyeglass lens. While the front of the bed illustrates the body at rest with the figurative casts that are attached to it, the back of the bed speaks to the interiority of the figure on the other side with its projected imagery.
