These images are part of an ongoing project exploring the meaning of a recurring dream that I have. In this dream I walk through a dense garden into a house.
In my dream I walk through the rooms that feel familiar and strange at the same time and enter through a door into another room full of shuttered windows. I open the shutters and see that the house is surrounded by the stillness of the sea. This is a garden and house I don’t recall ever being in, but it’s always the same garden, the same house, the same rooms, the same windows and the sea. This is a dream I know intimately. The images are fragmented and layered and suspended and then they dissolve and I wake up.
These images are about the strong emotional response I have to the part in the dream that happens before I enter the house. I am surrounded by trees and foliage that is dense. I am trying to find my way. This feels like more than a garden. It’s a maze of memories, a labyrinth. Through my multi exposure photographs I am trying to peel off the layers of this dream to find meaning in my subconscious mind. With my photographs I’m walking inside my surreal dream and attempting to capture the fleeting, layered and fractured moments. Are these suppressed memories, or visions from a prior life? What do our dreams tell us?
I choose to present my work in black and white, because I don’t want the color to be a distraction. This allows the focus of the image to be on the textures, forms and the interplay of light and shadow. This creates the dreamy quality of the photograph. It creates a personal and universal perspective, a connection with the natural world.
What do these images evoke in the viewer? Can they find their own meanings in these images? By overlapping two, three and sometimes four images I want the viewer to feel movement and enter a surreal world. I am trying to create a visual rhythm to capture the viewers imagination. I want the layers in my photographs to create tension and add complexity and depth to the image. The photographic interplay between the elements of nature is there to challenge the viewer’s perception and exploration of their own reality.
Can they feel the space where boundaries dissolve and time bends? Do they feel they have become a part of this landscape?
These photographs should have different meanings for different people. There is no fixed narrative, but rather a feeling, a presence. The multi exposure technique creates layered images and mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and surreal quality of the subconscious mind. Each photograph becomes a map to discover one’s dream’s essence, familiar, yet foreign. For the viewer it could be an abstract vision, an ever-changing feeling. At times the overlap and blending of branches with tree trunks, of tree trunks with leaves, of branches with water or the layers of branches with flowers create a textured tapestry that feels intricate and expansive. Each multi exposure composition conveys a new narrative, a new dreamscape. The images read as the in-between spaces for each individual. The spaces between dreaming and wakefulness, the spaces between light and dark, the spaces between knowing and the unknowns are manifest in these multi-exposure images.
This project is a work in progress. It is important for me through my photographs to untangle the memories or the visions that are hidden in the recesses of my mind. I will continue to explore the organic forms that are in my subconscious and to translate these into narratives through my photography. By focusing on these textures and patterns I want to invite the viewer to look closer through the layers and find their own stories in the details.
About Suzette Dushi
Suzette Dushi was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1957. She graduated from New York University with a degree in Marketing and worked as a financial analyst in banking. She studied photography at the International Center of Photography.
Her work has been accepted into various group exhibitions in the US and Europe, including the Istanbul Biennial, the Islip Art Museum and the 13th and 17th Julia Margaret Cameron Award for Women Photographers. Her portfolio of collages was showcased at Davis-Orton Gallery in Hudson, New York. She was part of Exhibition Lab 2023 at Foley Gallery in New York City. Her photographs have been published in various publications. She was awarded Gold Artist for her work “Winter” by ArtAscent Magazine. Her work is in private collections in the US and abroad. Suzette Dushi lives and works in New York and Long Island. [Official Website]
