Susan Cipcic

Slumber Party (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on…”), 2005
A collaborative installation

In The Enchanted World of Sleep, author Peretz Lavie notes that human beings spend approximately one third of their lives immersed in the realm of sleep. Here one’s fleshly existence is transmuted as the undertow of sleep transports her/his being to the Land of Nod.

This installation is a playful encounter, a slumber party, a Dionysian frolic with fanciful creatures on a swirling borderland.

Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse), a Surrealist drawing technique, was employed to create the strange hybrid entities, but in this instance, using pillowcases instead of paper. According to this method, each pillowcase was divided into thirds, and three individuals took turns drawing a section without looking at what had been set down earlier.

A group of five senior Agnes Scott art students (Wasfia Chowdhury, Ashley French, Kirby Hager, Kathryn Spinnato, and Samantha Swaney), friends and family, chance acquaintances, faculty and staff collaborated to generate these weird and wonderful beings. Some of the pillowcase drawings are displayed on the sheet-draped walls, as if emerging from the fabric of dreams, while others possess the more tangible forms of pillows, those comfortable surrogate body-forms that we often hug at night.

After removing your shoes, please feel free to enter the environment for a closer examination of the artwork.