Dream Object (I Was Working on an Undersea Landscape)
Shaw began to draw the contents of his dreams in the early 1990s, after years of recording them in bedside journals and audiotapes. Soon he was producing three-dimensional versions of these manifestations of his unconscious, using illusionistic skills he had learned as a special effects designer in Hollywood. For this example, he hired the Los Angeles–based professional photographer Douglas Parker to make an image of an idyllic suburban cottage. Shaw then cut the finished photograph into two sections, dividing house from lawn, and inserted between them a sheet of blue-tinted Plexiglas he had painted with a variety of fanciful sea creatures. The result resembles a 3-D image viewed without the glasses—a hallucinatory projection of the artist’s "head space" into our own.
Artwork Details
- Title: Dream Object (I Was Working on an Undersea Landscape)
- Artist: Jim Shaw (American, born Midland, Michigan, 1952)
- Date: 1997
- Medium: Gelatin silver prints, foam core board, blue tinted acrylic sheet with acrylic paint
- Dimensions: Overall: 22 5/16 × 30 in. (56.7 × 76.2 cm)
Panel A: 21 7/8 × 18 11/16 in. (55.5 × 47.5 cm)
Panel B: 22 5/16 in. × 30 in. (56.7 × 76.2 cm)
Panel C: 22 5/16 in. × 30 in. (56.7 × 76.2 cm) - Classifications: Photographs, Collages
- Credit Line: Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2015
- Object Number: 2015.579a–c
- Rights and Reproduction: © Jim Shaw
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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Jim Shaw
1978
Jim Shaw
1978
Jim Shaw
1977
Jim Shaw
1978
Jim Shaw
1978
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