(Saturday, June 21, 2014, Summer Solstice) I’m participating in an outdoor art event. All the artwork must be created on site, in a green wooded area with open, grassy meadows. I’ve decided to make a life-size sculpture of a tree out of artist’s canvas. The canvas is too thick to easily stitch by hand so I am at my studio-mate Mary’s house, searching for a little hand-held sewing machine. I’m looking in her light-colored craft room. The walls are lined with white shelves and most of the stored items are office supplies, things one would use for graphic design, not for sculpture. Mary loves to sew, but I can’t find a sewing machine so I settle on a stapler and a few boxes of staples. I can also use the staples to simulate the texture of bark on the canvas.
I head out to the art event. The gallery head and lead juror is Fariba Bogzaran, the artist who won two top prizes at the dream conference. She is sitting at a large table in the grass. Just as at the conference, I cannot remember her name, which in the dream is something other than Fariba. I call her Sala. This makes her extremely exasperated and she waves me off to her assistant, whose name really is Sala.
Sala sits at a table across from Fariba. She greets me warmly. She gets up from her table and puts her right arm around my shoulders, leading me away from Fariba. She’s going to bring me out to the grassy field where I will be creating my sculpture.
I am very concerned about the manner in which I create and fasten the seams of my tree piece but not at all worried about filling it with stuffing. Will I use grass or leaves? Or will it remain empty, like an open channel?
Day notes:
Sala has two meanings: (1) a large hall or reception room; (2) an island
In real life, Fariba Bogzaran was Monica Del Bosque’s professor at JFK University. Sala in my dream is very much like Monica, both physically and emotionally. Monica was the gallery head at the dream conference. Ed Kellogg didn’t seem to think Fariba should have won the juror’s prize because, technically, her sculpture was not about a particular dream but was about the process of dreaming. Mythological.