Bitter moon

For those not as insomnia-inclined as myself, one-third of our lives are spent asleep. However, the idea that we rest for these eight hours is misleading. Our minds never shut off. Our eyes might take a break, but our brains do not. Sometimes we have no memories of our dreams, other times, we catch fleeting glimpses of them before they follow the dark into the oblivion of day, and still others we remember vividly as long as our memory last. Forgotten or remembered, our dreams never stop. There are no dreamless nights except for those that never end.

Dreams confuse and clarify reality. They can be bizarre, beautiful, terrifying, funny, and deeply sad. In short, they are everything we experience in life without the immediate material guidance of the senses. Sometimes they are our best friends, an escape from the misery of the material world. Other times, they enhance that misery to nearly unbearable proportions, and still others, they intrude into happy days like a knife. They can alleviate and create despair, but they never act alone. No one has a nightmare who has not experienced sadness. No one has a pleasant dream who has never experienced happiness. They are the closest thing to mirrors for the soul. In our waking hours, we can see all the emotions our faces can impart reflected in mirrors. Our ocular gaze is most inwardly directed when we stare into the often-unpleasant looking glasses that seem to confront us at every turn. But no matter how jarring these reflections are, they are nothing compared to the introspection of dreams.

Out of necessity, we learn to control our expressions. We might be able to fool others about what lies behind our smile or frown, but we can take comfort in knowing the truth behind the façade. It is often sad to know that what we see in the mirror is not what we feel, but at least we know. There is power in knowing; there is control. Dreams, however, do not afford us this clarity. They are muddled and wild, transient, scaring, and all too often, completely opaque. Traumas we smashed down into our unconscious bubble forth to the surface once the safeguards of our consciousness relax. Fears we repressed come back with a vengeance in the labyrinth of sleep. Joys that we stifle because they do not fit into the narratives of our lives explode with tremendous velocity in our "rest ." Dreams are not a break from the world but an assault on everything in the world we vainly try to control. They are not the chickens resting but the chickens coming home to roost. How unfair is an existence that allows for ignorance only until we are too weak to exercise it? This is the tragedy and ecstasy of life, the pleasure and perils of imagination and introspection. We run the gauntlet of life only to run the even more labyrinthine gauntlet of dreams. Try as we might, we cannot escape ourselves or the world that made us.

As with life, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of dreams is their overlap. Galina Hristova’s Bitter moon is based on dream studies of several women and encapsulates various commonalities between their nocturnal explorations. Despite being the most inner of our inner recesses, dreams are far from unique. Common themes, archetypes, and sensations appear repeatedly in everyone's nighttime wanderings. Certain material conditions will create more substantial similarities between some people than others. For example, I imagine the threatening presence of the three dogs in Bitter moon is partially a manifestation of the tragically constant threat of predatory men. While the beasts might vary, their vile existence is far too universal. However, this is only a surface-level reading of the work. Hristova communicates the web of sleep and all its contradictions on Bitter moon’s oil-stained canvas.

The subject exists in a space that is both exterior and interior. She gazes out from eyes cloaked in a barbed-wire crown of thorns. She lays half in a room and half on a surreally building-lined shore. She casts a shadow of color while surrounded by neutral tonality. She lives and breathes the endless contradictions of anything but restful repose.

Your use of color and form in this piece is beautiful! I really like the contrast of the strictly representational with the more loose and abstract elements.