Under the Sea
Fantastical Dream
This project explores the world of dreams that we enter when we fall asleep. Throughout the series, the subject in the photographs goes on an adventure with their dog in the dream world. The adventures in the series are literal interpretations of often-used idioms and phrases, from “I’m On Cloud Nine” to “Time Is Running Out”. The narrative of the series begins with a girl and her dog waking up in their room to find it filled with water that they must swim out of to safety. They escape to a hot air balloon as the sun is rising that takes them to the ground where it begins to rain cats and dogs. They then fly off unscathed on a couple of birds that are forced to return them to ground level when they realize that a band of clocks is running away with their adventures. Forced to accept their fate, the dream turns into a nightmare as the girl and dog follow the clocks through the door back to reality, where the girl wakes up to what was all just an exciting dream. This series uses compositing to create a fictitious world that would not have been possible to photograph otherwise. Throughout the series, there is an illustration motif that incrementally pulls away in the photographs to represent the fictitious reality of the dream ripping away from the dreamer. What was once a whimsical world that was all fun and games, where anything could happen, transforms into a dark and mundane carbon copy as the dreamer is called back to their world. Bright colors are used in the middle four images of the series to show how lively the dream world is, and the first image has more muted colors (with the exception of the water’s surface that acts as the entrance to the dream world) to show they have not truly entered the dream world yet, and the last image is completely void of color to showcase the dreamer being fully taken back to reality. A motif of rainbows is used throughout the images to represent not only the light that can come after darkness but also the light that can be taken away if overcome by an influx of darkness.
I'm on Cloud Nine
It's Raining Cats and Dogs
Birds of a Feather Flock Together
Time is Running Out
Waking Up to Reality
