Tableaus From A Dream * Installation (Liquid Silver Gelatin Emulsion on Muslin, Beeswax), 2025
Dreams are a valuable look into the subconscious- into fears, worries, and wants both known and unknown. This body of work was born from my fascination with the way that the mind grabs hold of objects, symbols, and scenes then presents them to you in dreams, regardless of conscious significance. This illustrates the lack of control we have over our own subconscious thoughts and I seek to highlight this fallibility. In his pioneering work On Dreams, Sigmund Freud asserts that the ‘indistinct’ elements (those whose origins and meanings are unclear) are most significant in dream interpretation. This idea is crucial to my practice. I develop imagery in my work by pulling from my own dreams, though direct interpretation is not my goal. Instead, the installation mimics the act of recalling dreams through the repetition and abstraction of constructed tableaus, immersing the viewer into a foggy dreamscape and hopefully their own subconscious. Large format photography lent itself to the subject matter, giving me precise control over focus, perspective, and proportion to push the surreal nature of the scenes. The haziness and inconsistencies inherent to my process of hand-coating fabric with liquid emulsion further obscure and abstract. Photography as a medium is assumed to be truthful, but by constructing scenes that distort setting, subject, and clarity, I call this expectation into question.
