Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of dream analysis as a means of unlocking the unconscious. He felt that dreams were fundamentally comprised of repressed psychological material and considered dreaming an expression of repressed conflicts or desires. Modern day theories pose that dreaming can help us process emotions by encoding and constructing memories of them. What we see and experience in our dreams might not necessarily be real, but the emotions attached to these experiences certainly are. The narrative of our dreams essentially tries to strip the emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the emotion itself is no longer active. The DreamScape series, captures psycho-therapeutic aspect of dreaming investigation through the lens of Surrealism—stripping down experiences, emotions, and memories. The creation process of this series includes dream analysis, psychoanalysis, research, journaling, meditation and lucid dreaming practices all of which are translate into digital artworks created through a combination of AI (Midjourney & DALL·E 2) as well as matte painting and compositing using Adobe Photoshop. This series intends to revisit the historical core intention of psychoanalysis in the surrealism art movement through a modern-day lens as well as open the viewer's mind not only to the world of tapping into the unconscious using dream exploration but also the therapeutic aspect of this type of practice in mental healing.
Technical Specifications: Matte painting & compositing using Adobe Photoshop; AI generation using Midjourney; composition editing using DALL·E 2.
Date of creation: November 21th, 2022
