Have you ever had a dream that felt extremely real?  The world around you seemed so familiar and certain.  You felt safe and carefree, existing in that space as though you were awake in your very own room.  Then the walls start to move or the shadows bend.  The blankets on your bed seem to be pulling further away from you.  The objects, once so familiar seem foreign and unusual.  You look for a point of reference to tell you that everything is real, but instead everything continues to change to things that you have never before seen.  You realize that the space around you is not as it seems.  What was once certain has become uncertain and what was once real has become questionable.

This uncertainty is the moment of transition; a stone dropped in the water beginning the faint circles of doubt that radiate outward.  There is a moment of realization that things are not as they seem and once this happens, we wake. This moment is almost always unsettling.  It is an interruption in our world.  It changes our mental course.  It confuses us, terrifies us, and warps our perceptions.  We are left questioning what we have experienced, where we were, and why it felt so real.  All of our dreams share this common feeling of irrational reality.

My work explores these moments of transition between dream and reality.  This shift often evokes feelings of unease and instability.  It triggers the question of what is real and what is a construct of our subconscious.  I create models of small imaginative worlds to be photographed and printed.  It is this process - this exploration of a self-constructed 3-D space photographed with a camera - that creates the visual space that replicates the same feelings that one encounters within a dream.  This use of photography and the visual rhetoric it carries, allows me to define a space that is in constant flux – shifting focus, reversing foreground and background and directing the viewer via depth of field. The camera is capturing a three-dimensional constructed world, flattening it to two-dimensions in a photograph, directing the focus of the viewer, and ultimately – though the manipulations of the tools I employ - suggesting a three-dimensional space.  Traditionally, photography is a form of representation and documentation.  It has been understood as a means through which we represent truth.  But in reality, it is a replacement, or a stand in, for the actual space that has been photographed.  It is a representation of reality – a kind of truth.  Through my photographs, I am representing a possible reality, but one that is skewed by impossibilities.

Through my process and the ultimate final product of my images, I am evoking from the viewer the same response that they have during a dream that stirs them awake.  The unsettling content and angles as well as the controlled depth of field all lead to this similar feeling of uncertainty and anxiety, not different from the anxiety we feel when we wake from a dream.  Printed large and mounted upon the wall, each of my photos is full of the unsettling and ominous imagery characteristic of the moment of transition between the dream world and the world of reality.  Just as when we awake from a very realistic dream, my images ask the viewer to question, “what is real?”