DREAM PILLOWS, 2023. Cyanotypes and paint on pillowcases.
In 2022, I asked strangers from Craigslist to send a voice message or email describing a recent dream they’ve had, and I would create an image based off the dream and send it back to them. The images took the form of pillows. Though dreams are fantastical, sharing them is intimate, they are portals to imagine what could be. I don’t know the people who shared their dreams with me, but I feel strangely close to them after.
Dream 1: “Hi, I'm calling about your post on Craigslist about a dream and I had a very powerful one recently. I think it's powerful, I understand I think the meaning pretty well, but my wife and I are in a rough spot in our marriage and she's got depression. And so she keeps saying like, you know, that I shouldn't be with her. She's very hopeless about our future and so I had a dream where we fell from an airplane, landed in the middle of the ocean, couldn't see land around us. She doesn’t know how to swim. So it took me a while in the dream to come up with some idea, but I taught her how to do a back float and asked her to hold on to my ankles and kick her feet while I swam with my arms and we just swam together like a little boat for a very very long time. So we found a land lodge. Before we started swimming, she said in the dream life, just leave me just leave me like, you know, you have a chance to save yourself and I'm just going to drown here.”Dream 2: “…I wake up (in my dream) and I’m in a cave. I’m holding a white teddy bear and wearing a white flowy nightgown with white flowers scattered all over. As I get up off the ground I realize that outside the cave at a distance is a fire. I hurry to run towards it because from my house I see the mountain the cave is in so I just know that fire is my home on fire. I run as fast as I can but it’s too late, the whole house is engulfed in flames. I’m crying and my white teddy turns into a dusty and dirty teddy, like it was in the fire. So I run around to the back where the window for my room is and I see nothing but flames. I can not find my mom, or dad. No one’s there to help me. I go around front and to my surprise there’s mom and dad standing on the front porch holding hands not moving, not saying a word as they too become part of the roaring fire. I look at teddy and realized now he’s got burn marks..”