Beginning at age of 13, I have had numerous experiences with lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis and night terrors. I began keeping a journal detailing many of the dreams I have had since.
Oneiric/Relics takes objects and scenes from these lucid dream experiences and recontextualizes them in the Eastern Christian, Roman Catholic, and Buddhist tradition of reliquaries or stupas. In The Essence of Christianity, German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach describes religions as such:
"Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality..."
In his seminal work Leviathan, Hobbes asks what the difference is between saying, "God spoke to me in a dream" and "I dreamt that God spoke to me." Dreams are by their very nature private and to communicate to another person what you have seen or experienced in a lucid dream is ineffable. Likewise, religious experiences or divine visions are also personal events that are beyond being verifiable and are subjective from person to person. Relics also draws inspiration from Jim Shaw's seminal "Dream Objects" series.
By framing these dream objects as existing outside of time and space, the items are stripped of whatever context they were conceived in. The objects are contained within the confines of the canvas in the way a reliquary would house the holy remains and belongings of a saint. The viewer is forced to contemplate on the importance of the selected objects and why they were selected. Oneiric/Relics poses the question: "What is worthy of veneration?" and "Is the root of religion nothing more than the byproduct of the unconscious human mind and imagination?"