Hello Calgary!
I'm looking for Calgarians interested in sharing their dreams with me for inclusion in a public art work.
The Proposal
I'm asking for residents of the city to submit a dream report of dreams dreamt on the night of October 31, 2010. Sentences, paragraphs or words will be collected and stitched into one continuous narrative that will then become a text-based artwork. This artwork will be presented in the City of Calgary's OPEN SPACES : Window to a View exhibition space located at the 7th Avenue LRT Platform adjacent to the Telus Convention Centre, between 1st and Centre Street S.E. The show will run between January 29th- April 24, 2011.
Conceptual Framework
The Calgary Dream Log is a continuation of a larger body of work I have been pursuing over the past three and a half years, collectively titled Dream Work.
Dream Work is a multifaceted body of work that takes its cue from dream research and documentation. The first project Dream Journal, involved capturing a sleeping portrait of myself via pinhole camera and notebook. I would leave the pinhole camera open for the entire night's sleep and would record my dream upon waking in the morning. The work is about process, observation, and documentation in attempt to record the un-recordable.
The second manifestation, titled Dream Lab, was an interdisciplinary project explored in collaboration with the Dream and Nightmare Lab at the Sacred Heart hospital in Montreal. In this incarnation, I became the subject of a lab experiment concerned with the hypnagogic, or sleep onset, stage of the sleep cycle.
The third incarnation of the dream work, titled Dream Log, took place within the Three Walls Gallery in Chicago in the fall of 2008. For the duration of the exhibit I recorded my dreams while sleeping in the gallery, approximately one month. I compiled a filing system that was influenced by my experiences at the Dream and Nightmare Lab and contained a sleeping portrait, a compact disc with audio recounting the dream and a written transcript. As a companion piece to my experience, I integrated a fourth project into the exhibition. This project became the Book of Dreams and involved inviting others to perform a similar self-observation via pinhole camera and through a collaborative dream journal.
The installation in the Open Spaces: Window to a View is a piece that would continue this thread of collaborative dream documentation. One of things I've observed through my work with dream documentation and reporting is that many people's styles of dream reporting are similar. More often than not, there is a focus on events and emotions that shift and tumble forth in an irrational manner. Often there are clear breaks between scenes or narratives that seem bizarre after the fact , but that most likely made sense at the time when it was dreamt.
I am asking participants to e-mail me a dream that they experience the night of October 31, 2010. October 31 – Hallowe'en – is a date that is already associated with a surreal extension of the real world and I plan to combine all the dream narratives submitted from this night into one cacophony of stream of conscious text. The idea being that this work will represent an alternate reality within the city. Each day the citizens of Calgary go about their everyday lives – somewhat rationally and routinely, but at night the consciousness of the city transforms to that of fantastical and unpredictable.
The final text piece will be presented as white text on a black background and fill the entire dimensions of the space 7th Avenue Window space.
