Deep Sleep.

This panoramic video installation explores the ineffable experience of dreaming.

The piece draws loosely from the Irish myth “Oengus and Caer”, a story about a faery prince who falls in love with the shape-shifting goddess Caer, who visits him in his sleep and takes the form of both woman and swan. As the legend goes, Oengus fell ill for three years and refused to leave bed, as he was happiest when sleeping because that’s when he could be with his true love. This installation explores the concept of wanting to exist solely in one’s dreams, particularly as current global public health conditions continue to erode our collective sense of community, autonomy, and safety in the “real” world. Retreating into the recesses of the mind to escape (and expand) reality becomes an essential survival tactic in an otherwise bleak present. Using the fragmented spirit of the swan as both a navigating force and enduring metaphor for transition, magic, and access to a world beyond our own, geometric shapes pull the viewer through multiple spaces unburdened by logic, physics, or a linear experience of time. Inevitably though, morning arrives, abruptly ending the magic as the viewer is pulled out of the fantastical dreamscape and back into their physical reality.