1 2 3 4 5 6

The Man Who Waits and Sleeps
While I Dream

(1997) originally presented as a multi media installation at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada using multiple visual projections and a complex audio playback system to physically secure the work to the gallery site. Exhibtion curated by Timothy Long.

A bookwork (winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award) was published by the Mackenzie Gallery with an essay by Jeanne Randolph

The work was reconfigured in 2003 and shown at Centre d'Art Passerelle in Brest France.

excerpt by Russell Keziere, Artbyte magazine

MacKenzie Art Gallery
Centre d'art Passerelle

I became interested in exploring dreams as the primary material of all narrative structures -- the first awkward stories we tell our own selves before our conscious selves can censor them.

Drawing on observation techniques from a 19th century sleep disorders clinic the work poses a charged but unexpressed intimacy between a professional observer and her sleeping charge.

In the main gallery space, a large video projection of an impossibly deep drain is surrounded by images, text, and sound. These elements tumble together in random sequences of narrative structure, and become source material for a kind of "conversation." The video excerpt is shown in an observation alcove, where the voice-over soundtrack can be heard through headphones.

This piece is built from a series of projections. Physically, the images are projected in different scales on all sides of the room; Psychologically, the projections are contained within the voice over as the observer projects her own thoughts and neuroses onto the sleeping subject. These projections can also be seen as metaphors for the exchange between artist and viewer; between separation and longing; between lovers; between the conscious and sub-conscious within ourselves. The viewer walks between the elements of the work, putting together a particular understanding based on the randomness of his own physical placement in the room. –– One has to be somewhere to be at all involved and so we bring to any story our own personal and cultural assumptions, interpreting not only the language of the narrative, but images and sensations as well.

A door knocker on the periphery serves as a hard physical presence into and away from the projected overlays in the rooms.