In early 2007 I had a series of dreams with a repeated theme - creatures with abnormal numbers of eyes. In this world of dreams lived one-eyed cats and sisters with three eyes. I found the continuity between these dreams interesting and the visual imagery was arresting - I still cannot shake the image of a blue cat with a single eye in his forehead, like the cyclops kitten from a year or two ago.

"Nightmare Box " is an illustration of the nature of dream-images, their haunting quality and their distorted size or importance. I created this sculpture with thin sheets of copper colored metal, the kind used in embossing work, brass rods, and an LED wired to a switch in the center. When turned on the light from the center of the piece projects shadows of its surrounding figures on all surfaces of the room, creating the illusion that these characters are larger than life and omnipresent.

The first step was designing the figures that would represent my dream images. I took images of cats - ones I drew as well as cats from paintings I came across in my research, including Dali's "Dream Caused by The Flight of a Bumble Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening" - and I cut a single, cyclops eye in each. Figures of people had three eyes cut out of each, and since few pieces were large enough to fit all three eyes on the face, I decided to not be too literal about where exactly these "eyes" should be placed. The structure these pieces would attach to was created by soldering brass rods into a box-shape. The cat and people figures were then glued to the frames of this box, and pieces were sculpted and shaped to add to the distortion of the projections.

I knew that finding an appropriate light source was crucial, and thanks to the theatre department's recent experiments with LED's I decided to try using one for this project. Originally I tested the piece's projections with a Mag Lite, but knew I wanted something more elegant than a disassembled flashlight. I wired an LED, switch, and battery pack together and created a lamp base for the sculpture to sit on.

|| created by Megan M. Reilly February 2007 for the ACTLab Studios, Austin TX ||