The Dreams piece is grouted and offers a fragmented, curving vision to suggest the fluidity of time and space and the consolidation and organization of experiences that happens in dreaming.
The composition for Dreams is cropped from the larger drawing for the final piece Flourish, connected to the last chapter about psychoanalysis. Our central ‘constructive memory’ circles have transformed into a path, connecting with the concepts of illumination and journey. Curved and fragmented text elements point to the function of dreams in consolidating and organizing experience. New ambiguous compositional elements may read as a code or information or connect with literal imagery in previous pieces.
Up until this piece, the photographs for each page layout have addressed the literal images featured in the Proust quotation. For Dreams, we needed photographs to provide visual metaphors for the non-picturable experience of dreaming. We selected this image featuring architectural disorientation and vibrant fluorescent lighting in the staircase at the Harris Theater in Chicago.
Images of neurons were provided courtesy of neuroscientist Justine Kupferman and tie back to the fundamental aim of the book project: to understand the neuroscience behind Marcel Proust.
See full Proust project series here