Ise

Abstract

A few years ago I had a dream that I was riding a school bus. As it carried us across the countryside, we came upon an old bridge. As the bus went to cross, it went out of control and broke through the tenuous wooden barriers, sending the bus hurtling several hundred feet toward the shallow stream below. At some point I was no longer inside the bus, but falling, face toward the sky, as I watched the rest of the passengers sprout wings and soar into the air above me.

When I woke I could feel my blood pressure spiking. Although the dream was full of ridiculous details, it seemed incredibly real, enough to alter the course of my sleep (and subsequently, part of my day). In the studio, I think about subjective experiences such as this dream— where the psychological boundary between what is real and what is not blur together and the gap created in their aftermath. These kinds of virtual spaces, interstitial, liminal in nature, echo some basic truth. Dreams, memories, experiences, and altered states speak to both the potential and limits of what we think of as reality. I seek to explore and traverse these spaces and to create traces of them.