Dream Book


Dream Book, produced in the fall of 2025 in a limited edition of ten copies donated to museums, libraries, and book archives throughout the world, explores the ways in which children process the world around them through dreams and the evolving relationships we have as adults with our childhood selves. This 46-page 14 cm by 10 cm hardcover book, which consists of multiple overlays of visual material and fragments of poetry in various languages, was created using a combination of commercial software designed for the creation of family photograph albums, the editing functions of my Macintosh computer and Adobe image-editing software. This book, which marks the first time that I have used autobiographical material in my artwork, has been structured around a series of snapshots taken of me at the age of six by various family members. I have employed these photographs, most of which document me reading or posing with Christmas and birthday presents but that also include a newspaper photograph of me participating in a Saturday morning art class and several snapshots of me sleeping, as the building blocks of an exploration of the process of becoming the people we grow up to be and our changing perceptions of our childhood selves over time. When not reading, dreaming, or sleepwalking around the neighborhood, my six-year-old self often watches what my grownup self is doing (which is usually making art). In turn, my adult self observes, photographs, and attempts to reassure and guide the child she once was. Subordinate imagery reflects things I recall finding interesting, amusing, perplexing, or frightening when I was small, from the possibility of setting sail for distant places with Margaret Wise Brown’s Golden Books Sailor Dog to a desire for bloody revenge inspired by Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes and the fear of nuclear war.

Dream Book has been structured in much the same way that modern poetry is constructed and incorporates fragments of poems by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Antonio Machado, Czeslaw Milosz, Audre Lorde, Maggie Smith, and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge as well as visual references to a poem by Federico García Lorca. It also features references to pieces of classical music I listened to as a child while I played with my dolls such as the “Song to the Moon” from Dvorak’s opera Russalka and Ferde Grofés Grand Canyon Suite.

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