ARTIST STATEMENT
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| The Book of Dreams |
| I live on a farm in a remote pocket of New York’s Hudson valley. I wander the fields for hours and often there is no human conversation. At first, I believed myself to be alone. I believed myself to be lonely. In fact I often used to find myself shouting out to the Drowned Land Swamp. “I am lonely. I am lonely.” And much to my surprise the swamp had a reply. “ Stop. Look. Listen. Learn the summer. Learn the winter. Underneath the silence you will hear the land humming quietly. We are dreaming here under the snow. Under the saw grass and cattails. We are dreaming here. Come back to these places over and over again and we will teach you to dream with us.” And so this is what I do. I dream this place. There are moments of great joy. Great beauty and overwhelming fear. It is not rational. It is not an intellectual exercise. It is a dreaming between the beating of my heart and the sudden flight of the heron loping overhead. It is a dreaming with some unfathomable creatures. Wearing wings. Wearing masks and befriending crows. They whisper to me and I am a child again. Unfettered and free. I set up my camera. Literally a large format wooden box with a pinhole for a lens. I slip in a sheet of film and begin to dance the dreams. The dreams of a place. Light falls onto the film. The film drinks the light and images form and the pictures are made. I am never entirely sure what pictures will come. I print the images and the dance continues. When another person views the images they become part of the dream . Their own dream in their own place. 1500 years ago in Mexico the Toltec people talked of dreaming heaven on earth. It was the human job to realign our hearts with God by dreaming heaven here. An anonymous Aztec poet later wrote: These Toltec’s were very wise, It was their custom to converse with their own hearts…. The created a whole system, The book of dreams… This work is my Book of Dreams. |