You dream my dream represents the tempo of fragmented memory behavior. Influenced by the complex emotions connected to my estranged father’s recent news that he is dying, this piece unfolds memory retrieval behavior. The audio work is separated into four segments, a song parody, disrupting memories of lightness and darkness, and perception merging. It hones in on music, objects, and moments that capture the duality of love and pain existing through mental spaces. Music that connects to sentimental imagery, specifically Supertramp, acts as a thread feeding together memories that have abandoned the self. When a song is reversed, I attempt to rewind reality. I’m extracting from the forgotten by collecting the sounds of mnemonic objects. All the sounds were pulled from my home to connect to my former home. My daughter's voice was incorporated to embody the power of neglect, as time with her grandfather erases. I’m using the whisper to capture the feeling of something being present and present-less.

You Dream my Dream

This audio paper considers how silence takes time in the tone of darkness but assess the silence of Sara Maitland and Salomé Veogelin. ​One can hear silence and the reverberations of silence (Sorensen 2008, 3). Silence possesses a push-and-pull effect, as it is desired and avoided in our human conditioning (Sontag 1967, 6; Kim-Cohen 2016, 106). Writer and philosopher Maurice Blanchot says we desire silence because it is impossible to encounter (1995, 11). Our collective subconscious sustains the persuasion of silence with noise. Within the scarcity of silence, we fantasize about silence. The desire to summon silence makes one feel alive. Nevertheless, we stutter when faced with silence. In Art and Fear, theorist Paul Virilio says that the postmodern condition in society is "pathologically uncomfortable with silence" (2003, 93). Silence can feel very awkward between strangers or can feel bonding between intimates. (Jaworski 1997, 27). The uncanny reality makes us yearn to hide from silence (Hägg and Kristiansen 2012, 17; Jaworski 1997, 145; Wittgenstein 1962, 3; Biguenet 2015, 84). Across from this, one may overflow gaps with words to avoid the same reality, both derived from heightened loss aversion (Bindeman 2017, 147). "How many hours are wasted in the dark supposing that the silence is judging you?" (Lispector 2015, 398)

Silence Takes Time in the Tone of Darkness

Brittany/Andrew Forrest (she/her or he/him) is a queer Ontario-based surrealist artist and author. She focuses on character development through drawing, sculpting, mold-making, and wording that stretches away from traditional approaches to represent the tale of her estranged identity. Her study of the body began as a young child through performing arts. Rigorous observational skills transitioned into a thriving art and writing practice penetrating all facets of the being. Forrest now focuses on dissecting human exchange and perception to find correlations within the interplay between bodies by accessing memories, dreams, the imagination, and layers of consciousness. The material selection employs various studies that engage in theoretics linked to her practice that anatomizes the intricacies of psychological defense mechanisms. She does this by researching the functions, associations, and interactions between materials – essentially psychoanalyzing the medium – to propose the body as animate and inanimate.

Forrest graduated with honors from McMaster University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts, minoring in Art History. There, she was awarded four academic scholarships, voted class choice, and earned the faculty award. During her subsequent Master of Fine Arts candidacy at Western University, she was accorded the Graduate Thesis Research Award and Graduate Travel and Research Grant. She will continue her graduate research at Western in the PhD Art and Visual Culture program beginning in the Fall, 2024. Her work was recently selected for the International Art Fair Mixing Identities (London, UK and Rome, IT), the New Realism/Altered Reality exhibition (New York City, NY), and was published in the ARTSIN SQUARE magazine. Forrest published her first autobiographical book, The Imaginary Imagination; a science fiction short story, Chair, in the art collective book titled Dystopia: A Visual Anthology; and curated her solo exhibition, gasp, at Satellite Project Space (London, ON) in 2023. A prolific author, Forrest also completed short story The Room, and books Dream Space and Velvet Ear in 2024. Lullaby is her MFA thesis exhibition.