In my video and performance work, I often use remix practices to rearrange, deconstruct, and critique mainstream media. Medium Dream Sequence continues this methodology and furthers my interest in female subjectivity and spectatorship.

I am using the television show Medium (2005-2011) as a dataset. I have logged and sampled each time the lead character is in bed, goes to sleep, and wakes up (seasons 1-3). She often wakes with a start, scream, or outburst of some kind because of her nightmares and psychic visions: Alison Dubois (played by Patricia Arquette) “sees dead people” in her dreams that help her fight crimes. I am interested in these near-sleep gestures as a metaphor for perceived female hysteria and sexuality.

I am also interested in reflecting on my own subjectivity in relation to this dataset and to what Patricia White terms “retrospectatorship,” a way of watching media texts that are formed by the memories, fantasies, and experiences of the viewer and how the production of subjectivity factors for both the character on screen and the spectator who faces it. Here, I am interested in how mediatization figure and reconfigure the female body while examining the repercussions of this configuration- Alison Dubois’ as well as my own.

Medium Dream Sequence (excerpt)
Dayna McLeod, 2015
22:49 minutes, colour