One morning when she was a young girl, Susan kae Grant woke from her night’s sleep and told her mother, “I went somewhere last night.” Since childhood, Grant has understood that the dream state transports her far from the material world of her bedroom. For the last twenty-five years, she has created a cycle of photographs composed of dream imagery conjured from her unconscious and from deep research into the science and magic of human sleep. In the early 1990s, Grant began collaborating with noted sleep researcher Dr. John Herman at the UT Southwestern Medical Center Sleep Laboratory, where she interrogated her own hyperactive REM sleep through controlled awakenings designed to elicit visual and verbal descriptions of the dream space. The phrases that were coaxed from her unconscious mind seeded Night Journey with a vocabulary that continues to inform her work: “Turning pages searching for a number… Not anchored by a bed… Filled with fluid… Frosted glass encounter… Sex is interrupted… These hands listening…”
Night Journey delivers a haunting shadow world made up of silhouetted figures and symbolic forms that envelopes viewers in the elusive terrain of the dream state. Through arresting black and white tableaux populated by fantastical creatures, animals, and children in hallucinatory settings, these photographs invite us to traverse the strangeness and chaos of breakneck contemporary life, like the dreams that inspired them. In nearly a hundred photographs, along with essays by Deboarh Willis with Mecca Brooks and Trudy Wilner Stack, Night Journey engages dream and memory as a portal into the mysterious space of sleep we all share.