Dreams fluctuate in potency, emotion, significance, and tone. People dream within their own idiosyncratic framework. It is a fabricated language of the subconscious. Dreams both invent and incorporate these personal symbols. Whether it is a preordained affinity for certain themes, or something defined by early visual experiences, each person possesses their own set of personal symbols and allegories. We have developed our own personal jargon comprised of both universal dream experiences (falling, flying, dreams of attack, nudity, etc) and personal symbols which when stripped away of their idiosyncrasies, are also universal.
These idiosyncratic symbols are combined with a conglomerate of emotion, connotations, obscure associations, memories, hybrid images, and fears. In memories your subconscious determines which factors are significant and which are extraneous. In dreams this is intensified and a series of fragmentations occur: fragments in time, in perceptions of space, and fragmentation of the senses.
It is this fragmentation and synthesis of personal iconography that I address in my photographs. Each photograph responds to a dream I collected through a combination of nightly journals, interviews, triggered recollections of lost dreams, and distant memories of childhood nightmares. The images vary both in size and process to mirror the unique message and influence of a single dream image. As a result, the work combines silver gelatin, chromogenic prints, with non-silver and digitally worked images. Each image is illuminated, yet there still remain portions that are obscured. The photographs, like dreams remembered in waking life, seem to emerge in fragments that are revealing, yet remain untranslated by the waking mind.