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Hello, I’m Britt Ragsdale, and I’m a MFA candidate at the University of Houston in studio art and this is my installation “Hypnopomp.”
Hypnopomp is my installation which is based on experience with isolated sleep paralysis and hypnopomp, which is the hallucinations associated with coming out of sleep.
And often they are credulous and emotional responses that people have with hypnopomp and sleep paralysis, which is when the body is in REM atonia to keep us from acting out dreams,
but our mind is starting to wake up the dream and mixes reality with the dream world. We have a tendency to feel stuck between two places, and so, this installation deals with that interstice between reality and dreaming.
When viewers come to see my installation they’re going to walk into a room filled with sheeted bodies that were created with actual sheets and starch. The sheets were soaked in the starch.
They can be hardened to take on any form. And with the bodies that they will see, it’s a familiar shape, but with them being scattered among the walls of the room, it creates a surreal effect with a realistic form.
I’d like to thank the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and their studio residency for allowing me the space at Lawndale Arts Center to create my installation “Hypnopomp.”