Dreams like Lynch & Mangum

Yesterday I saw the David Lynch documentary.  I was surprised to find that his artistic roots lie in painting and sculpting.  I was not surprised to find that he has a dark sense of humor and a very dark and repeating theme of fear in his upbringing and artwork.  I find overlapping themes between the work of Lynch and the work of Jeff Mangum, who has openly described the nonsensical nature of his work and the inspiration coming from his dreams (see Pitchfork interview ca. 1997).  Horror is erotic and fascinating to me.  This element resonates in many of my photos, in a subtle way.  My dreams generally take place in familiar places,  homes to be exact, usually of people that I know.  I am crawling through the walls of these homes and squeezing my body into unknown passages.  Lately, I am focusing on just photographing suburbia.  We all build these boxes that we live in, build connections in, face horrors and realities in, and in the suburbs, two drastically different stories sit just a few feet away from one another.  While my photos are colorful, they feel underscored by darkness.  Perhaps this has to do with my own upbringing and dark childhood memories that were contained in my home.  However, we all have these memories.  One of my favorite Neutral Milk Hotel lyrics reads:

Blister please with those wings in your spine
Love to be with a brother of mine, how he'd love to find
Your tongue in his teeth in a struggle to find
Secret songs that you keep wrapped in boxes so tight, sounding only at night as you sleep

And in my dreams you're alive and you're crying
As your mouth moves in mine, soft and sweet
Rings of flowers 'round your eyes and I'll love you
For the rest of your life when you're ready

Either/Or

The appeal of digging up the past is the facade of better understanding the present.  The reality of such an action just leads to more digging.  We can understand the major events and how those might shape who we are or who they are, but what about everything else that has slipped through the cracks?  What about that one time that you felt afraid to go down a water slide alone? Or that time that you kissed a stranger at a Chicago rave?  Do the smaller pieces of the past get dissolved and washed away or are they part of soil beneath our feet that help us stand?  Do each of those tiny grains of dirt keep piling and piling to outweigh the major events?  

To Those Who Read This Blog

If you like what I post on here, I urge you to take a look at this interview: http://pitchfork.com/features/interview/7471-neutral-milk-hotel/

I find Jeff Mangum (and Neutral Milk Hotel) to be totally inspirational.  I love how his music is not easy to digest, but can be viscerally understood.  

I feel similarly to the way he describes his music and his dreams as all flowing together in a universe of no particular time, but of one connected place.  My dreams are my favorite, terrifying universe.  I find that my photos capture just a glimpse of what those dreams might look like.  Constant twilight, vast fields and paths through forests, mysterious homes, colors coming from unknown places.  These visions are a small glimpse into my dreams.  This surreal living and breathing and hiding behind you in the real.

The anti-Chris Knight

Judy dreams of horses, but I dream of homes, where they might be, and who might inhabit them. I think that they are homes of my past life, not in a sense of reincarnation, but homes inhabited by who I used to be.  Why did Judy dream of horses?  To retrieve her lost winsomeness?  To distract her inimical internal dialogue with a conversation with an animal?  To express her suppressed temerity?  Dreams of homes allow me to open doors that I did not know exist.  I open them to find secrets behind incandescent lights, smiling facades, straightened hair, and blue-lit white walls.  

There exists a home with life in the ceilings.  Three stories, too many fantasies, and one singular tale that pervades every dream that I dream.  I crawl in the ceilings of this home to escape the horror that unfolds between them.  In the ceiling I feel safe.  To separate myself from what is happening below, I am safe.  Yet, I am uninvolved.  I crawl from room to room and onward to new homes.