Introduction (2000-Present)
After twenty years of creating a cycle of dream imagery conjured from her unconscious and from deep research into the science and magic of human sleep, Susan kae Grant’s long term project, Night Journey delivers a haunting shadow world of ethereal photographs. The result of a now signature studio practice, Grant first devises inky silhouettes and symbolic forms, and then invests them with emotional and psychic narrative power in eighty resonant tableaux. The Night Journey that unfolds retraces her memory and animates her fantasy in a synthesis akin to dreaming.

In images that recall Victorian spiritualism, the lurking Nosferatu of F.W. Murnau, and the allegory of Plato’s Cave, the project unlocks clues to the mystery of what we see when we sleep and exposes the surreal imprint of experience. These photographs also help us traverse the strangeness and chaos of breakneck contemporary life, like the dreams that inspired them. With Night Journey near completion, its transformation into a book will eventually document the breadth and consequence of Grant’s career-defining opus.

Studio Practice

Working in her Dallas studio, Susan kae Grant employs a 4 x 5 view camera with a digital back and creates studio sets to transform models and props into the contoured scenes of Night Journey.

When staging narratives, she freshly enlists myth, metaphor, and memory in a vision widely known and exhibited. Grant’s compositional approach, technique, and thematic concerns shift over two decades of production, making the series a dynamic, layered discovery of her particular shadow theatre.

References from fairytale to nightmare, from backyard to backstage, from the quotidian to the fantastic, infuse this work with classical and contemporary tropes.

The first exhibition of Night Journey was at 5501 Columbia Arts Center in Dallas, Texas with support from Contemporary Culture, Documentary Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, Texas Woman’s University, Fisher Textiles, City Color and private contributions. During the exhibition, Dallas NBC affiliate produced a special report including interviews with sleep specialists and a walk through the installation. In an essay for the exhibition catalog, the late Barbara McCandless, Curator of Photographs, (Amon Carter Museum) writes,

“As the figures’ actions and the objects seem to hold some symbolic meaning, they encourage speculation, yet resist traditional psycological interpretation. Instead, the overall impression is experiential, of being in the dream, where images change quickly and fade from memory.”

Works on Paper

In addition to the installation of fabric images, beginning in 2002, for an exhibition at Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas, Grant extended the Night Journey project to include works on paper as framed images.

The images on paper are printed by the artist as 47”x35” and 27.5”x20” limited edition archival pigment prints on Hahnemüle 308 Rag papers.

Edition sizes are 9 and 20 respectively. Each print is finished with a hand-torn white border and a de-bossed signature stamp on front and labeled and hand-signed en verso.

Video Projection

In 2011, Grant began collaborating with visual artist Richard Klein on video works that combine moving shadows with still images as a way to bring shadows to life on the gallery wall.

For the 2012 exhibition, Theatrical Realms of The Whimsical & Tragic, Grant and Klein created a video piece that portrays passing moments of memory and recollection titled, Momentary Notations.

Triptychs

In 2017, by shifting views and focus, Grant challenge’s the viewer to contemplate a central narrative in her Conduit exhibition, convergence.

Constructed entirely as triptychs, the images presented envision connections made from moments of episodic memory to observations based in reality.

The juxtapositions elicit multiple meanings and connections to visual memory.

The triptychs are printed by the artist as limited edition archival pigment prints on Hahnemüle 308 Rag papers in an edition size of 3. The total running length of each is 52.5”x145.5” and 35”x94”.

Each print is finished with a hand-torn white border and a de-bossed signature stamp on front and labeled and hand-signed en verso.

History

The Night Journey installation of images on Chiffon debuted April 2000 at 5501 Columbia Art Center in Dallas, Texas and subsequently has toured to 14 venues. To date the project includes lectures, panel discussions, publications, catalogs and exhibitions at museums, art centers and galleries in the United States, British Columbia, China, Denmark, England, Germany, Japan, Spain and Italy.

The first solo exhibition of the Night Journey works on paper was in 2002 at Women & Their Work gallery in Austin, Texas. Solo and group exhibitions of the works on paper number over 50 venues.

In June of 2003, on the occasion, of the 50th anniversary of REM sleep, a solo exhibition of Night Journey works on paper debuted at the 17th Annual Meeting of the Association of Professional Sleep Society in Chicago, Illinois.

To provide context to the exhbition, sleep scientist, Dr. John Herman authored an essay that speaks to the link between art and science and in so writing describes Night Journey as,

“an artistic interpretation of REM sleep dreaming that is faithful to the properties of dreams that were simultaneously emerging from sleep laboratory studies: the de-saturated appearance, the indistinct, ethereal properties of seemingly familiar objects, and the strong narrative quality.”

Publications, Essays & Video Documentaries

A selection of notable recent and upcoming books featuring Night Journey include: 

• The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography edited by Marni Shindelman and Anne Leighton Massoni

• Finding Your Audience: An Introduction to Marketing Your Photographs by Mary Virginia Swanson (Forthcoming) 

• Dreams, Visions, Other Worlds: Interviews with Texas Artists by Robert Bunch (Forthcoming)

Publications

A selection of publications featuring Night Journey are wide ranging, from periodicals to textbooks to group exhibition catalogs and include:

Exhibition Essays

A selection of essays for solo exhibitions of Night Journey include writings by Trudy Wilner Stack, Dr. John Herman and Barbara McCandless:

• Frosted Glass Encounters*
  Trudy Wilner Stack, Independent Curator
  https://womenandtheirwork.org/wp-content/uploads/Susan-Kae-Grant.pdf
  download PDF

• A Photographerʼs Interpretation of Her Sleep Laboratory Dreams
  Dr. John Herman, PHD
  download PDF

• Some Think That in Dreams . . .
  Barbara McCandless, Curator of Photographs, Amon Carter Museum

Video Documentaries

A selection of video documentaries about Night Journey include a a studio interview by Genevieve Russell of StoryPortrait Media, a Hahnemühle paper endorsement, and a studio visit with Ben Long for Linkedin learning.

• Susan kae Grant Artist’s Video (8:27)
  Video documentation and interview in studio, 2014. Produced by Genevieve Russell, StoryPortrait Media, Verve Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
  

• Susan kae Grant Prints on Harman by Hannemuhle Professional Inkjet Paper (2:30)
  Video documentation, interview and paper endorsement in studio, 2011. Produced by Richard Klein & Richard Krall for PDN PhotoPlus International Conference and Expo, Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, New York City.
  

• Introducing Susan Kae Grant: Photography: Advanced Composition with Ben Long (30:3)
  Video documentation and interview in Grant’s studio with Ben Long, 2017. Produced by Lynda.com - LinkedIn Learning.
  

• Susan kae Grant: In 2000, Dallas NBC affiliate produced a special report including interviews with sleep specialists and a walk through of the original installation at 5501 Columbia Art Center.