All images © Sarah Fuller
This intimate project aptly titled Book of Dreams taunts the viewer to jump the chasm between a subconscious dreamworld and the external sleeping experience that occurs contiguously.
Artist/collaborator Sarah Fuller explains: "each participant takes home my pinhole camera and sets it up with the aperture facing their bed as per my instructions outlined in the back flap of the journal. Upon waking, the shutter is closed and the participant records the contents of what was dreamed during the 8 to 9 hour exposure. As an evolving book of dream recordings, the journal has the interesting function of acting as an archive of the people whose dreams are inside and an ever-growing intimate story book that each contributor has the opportunity to read before adding their own entry."
Book of Dreams seems to lie at the crossroads of performance and artifact. Highly forensic, the viewer is steered down the avenues of psychoanalysis and the pseudo-science of graphology. The inpenetrability of the project seems to question the empirical nature of portraiture itself, and what can be known is built on the fascinating but tenuous, double-handed foundations of dreams and their vernacular.
Having completed her BFA in 2003 at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, Sarah Fuller went on to complete residencies in both Iceland and Canada and exhibit at galleries such as Latitude 53 in Edmonton, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary and Three Walls Gallery, Chicago, Ill. Her work is also held in collection at the Canada Council Art Bank and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Fuller is currently working towards exhibiting new work at the Art Gallery of Alberta in May 2011.
