Installation detail: 7 small monitors on the floor in a dark room with images of McLeod sleeping

Restless

Produced as part of the PHI Parallel Lines Residency program, Restless is a video installation that centres sleep and sleep disturbances. It is made up of 2 components: an outdoor projection, and a room with 7 monitors.

Part of Restless is presented outside the PHI Centre at nightfall, blurring the boundary between the intimacy of sleep and the public nature of surveillance. The gallery installation features 7 monitors that are randomly placed on the floor in a pitch-black room made especially for the exhibition at PHI. Each monitor features a different loop of me and my girlfriend sleeping captured with night-vision surveillance. A nightmare, involuntary arm aerobics, sleep talking, and waking up are some of the loops captured.

Conceptually, I am interested in collaborating with my subconscious self as sleeping subject, and non-sexualized representations of queer coupling and middle-ageing queerness. Formally, I am interested in exploring night-vision as a surveillance technology, and its potential when we turn this tech on ourselves. I am interested in the quality of these surveillance images and how this imaging technology contributes to, shapes, and informs the meaning and emotion of an image and its subject(s) through pixilation, blurriness, perspective distortion, grain, and lighting.