Dream

Contemporary art is so much enamored of the idea of the dream that one would be hard-pressed to name an artist in the postwar era who did not engage the subject on some level. The work or stages in the work of some artists revolves around dreams. African and African-American artists such as Olu Amoda (b. 1959), in his Window of Dreams (1991), and Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), with his Dreams #2 (1965), have engaged the dream as a metaphor in particularly poignant and affecting ways.

Though photography is a static medium, it is like film in that it is self-conscious about giving the appearance of replicating reality while never actually and completely doing so. Jerry Uelsman's (b. 1934) untitled images with dream themes owe their sensibility to the painted dreamscapes of the nineteenth century, while works like Ralph Gibson's (b. 1939) Sonambulist Series (1968), with its creepy hand reaching out of a doorway, draw on the fearful depths of human consciousness, known to the ancients, filtered through Freud and Jung, and always lurking under the surface.

Yet the dark and menacing vision, as eternal and pervasive as it is, is matched by an equally pervasive transcendent mythic consciousness. Contemporary photographers Suzanne Scherer (b. 1964) and Pavel Ouporov (b. 1966), in their preoccupation with the dream, draw on such mythic archetypes as a dream maze replete with minotaur, and an Icarus-like flying dreamer, a topos they share with contemporary artists, notably Jonathan Borofsky (b. 1942) in his series titled I dreamed I could fly.… These works articulate and draw upon common dream themes in all times and places, from Muhammad's flight to Usha's, to the launching of the very universe from Krishna's dream.