makayla songer

 There is a moment, often, in dreams, when I press my palms down flat against the air—trying to find a surface to press on to—to lift myself up.  Sometimes it's like finding invisible stone materialized beneath my palms, but sometimes my hand slips through, sinking a bit like pressing into mud.  In these moments, there is a question: did my dreams spill out?  That is to say, am I actually flying? 

 

There were other moments, in nightmares this time, where no space stays the same.  It is shifting, changing, entrapping, and most of all dangerous.  It is the space between spaces, and it's not empty.  Are these places real or imaginary?  Neither. Both.  They feel like places where the imaginary can be punctured, in search of a super-real, something sensed but not seen or articulated.

 

These dreams and the questions they raise (even if only in the moment) relate to the use of nightmare logic in film.  If dream and nightmare logic represent the moment when accepted reality is fractured or broken, then the uncanny is the moment when reality is questioned: that flicker of am I dreaming, am I flying. 

 

Recent work forms fully realized spaces that manifest these ideologies in a waking state, creating a questionable, unclear reality.  Using the multiple, I am creating common domestic objects (faucets, lamps, windows) and installing them in conjunction with light, video, and sound to create shifting layered spaces.