Artist Statement
The depiction of the dream throughout art history has been used under a wide variety of intentions, from acting as a means to relay religious visions during the Renaissance, to a means of embodying the purest form of creative expression for the Surrealists. Nonetheless, with these various motives of utilizing the dream already established, there was still the missed opportunity to explore the dream itself as the main subject in painting. More specifically, through the symbolic synchronicities they hold between our conscious and unconscious states of being. Our waking lives and our dream lives.
For this body of work, Dreams of Reality, I began to focus on the broader topic of reality through the lens of dreams and the practice of dream analysis. This being a juxtaposition that I deemed pertinent as dreams could be considered the antithesis of reality. However, if analyzing a dream can reveal deep psychological truths about someone during their waking life, is there really such a separation between the two after all? What is the relation between the reality we experience in our waking life, versus the sense of reality we feel when in a dream state? To narrow this ongoing exploration, I approached the topic of reality and the unconscious self from the perspective of Jungian analytical psychology.
By making this work, particularly through the course of analyzing my own dreams for reference, I began noticing patterns in the types of imagery being presented, this resulting in a collection that eventually formed a symbolic vocabulary. This lexicon of symbols has allowed me to begin to better understand the nature of how the unconscious mind processes conscious information via the dream. These dream symbols ultimately giving way to what is Dreams of Reality.
