the ghosts in our heads: dream states & the practice of archiving metaphysical snapshots is a video installation by Indigenous digital-media artist Shawn Johnston. In creating the work, Johnston used dreams and the remembrance of dreams to explore what connects spirit to place, space, and time, including the language we use to express this connection. The project exemplifies the artist's active exploration of new media art through a queer Anishinaabe perspective. It emphasizes the "energies of things—places, people, ideas, etc.—while addressing what lies beyond." In the following essay, curator Bonnie Devine expands on dreams and their central role within Johnston’s practice.

Library of Dreams: The Art of Shawn Johnston

Some people have their best ideas when they’re asleep. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after a dream. Dmitri Mendeleev is said to have constructed the periodic table of elements after its organizational structure came to him in a dream. Even the inspiration to place the eye at the opposite end of the sewing machine needle occurred to Elias Howe while he was dreaming. For all human beings, but perhaps especially for those in the act of creating, such as artists, thinkers, and scientists, sleep provides a rich playground for visual and theoretical ideas to shift, drift, and reassemble in startling, innovative ways.

But though sleep—that country we visit in our minds every night—is dark, it is also unambiguously demarcated from our waking lives, while the approaches to sleep, those times when we are dropping off or waking up, are transitory frayed borderlands where clarity and hallucination mingle, and strange half-conscious visions occur. It is this transitional place, this fragile floating grey space, this hypnagogia, that Shawn Johnston evokes in his exhibition the ghosts in our head: dream states & the practice of archiving metaphysical snapshots.

In photo-based works such as BVRCH V3 (2019–20) and DON’T BELONG HERE (2019), barely familiar figures dissolve and float in empty black or white fields, detached from all but a fleeting memory of reality, teasing the mind to connect, straining the imagination to decipher and reconstruct what meaning may lie at their heart. METAMORPH (2016), a triptych of threatening portraits, is less delicately fragile. Instead, figures are tangled and coiled in angry mosaics that haunt and disturb. They confront us with a nightmarish mixture of menace and suffering.

Johnston allows his images to flicker and waft in a hazy zone between memory and amnesia, the familiar and the alien, the possible and the unimaginable. Perhaps it is the persistent echo of his Indigenous heritage that brings these visions into being, to replay in dreamlike fragments the familiar tropes that often appear in his art. For instance, the deer-hoof rattle seen in FRVQUENCIES (2018) is drawn from his photograph of a lonely object he found in a museum’s backroom storage vault, which he reawakened using digital mobilization and animation software in video and sound. Similarly, the photograph of a sprig of white sage in SHADOW STUDIES: SAGE (2022). What narratives of transformation and survival were aroused and released when Johnston mused on the plant’s tender form and dreamt into being its preposterous flight through outer space in his digital iteration TETHERS (2023–24)?   

This is the thing about hypnagogia, threshold experiences, and dreams. They resonate in wisp-like fragments. They move us to vividly remember or imperceptibly forget. To forget what we’d meant to remember. To remember what we’d hoped to forget. Hypnagogia’s hallucinatory phenomena are like a borderland that safeguards the knowledge, memory, and wisdom of our dreams. Shawn Johnston’s collection of limpid images takes us into the heart of that borderland and invites us to peer into the swirling veils that shroud our dreams. 

Presented by John B. Aird Gallery in partnership with CONTACT. Supported by a grant from the K M Hunter Foundation

Curated by Bonnie Devine

• Shawn Johnston (he/him/his) is an Indigenous Digital Media Artist. Shawn recently received his Master of Information (MI) from U of T, where his area of focus was Archives and Records Management (ARM) & Culture and Technology (C&T). His work explores the body, memory, culture, identity & their relationships within the evolving landscape of technology. He has presented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Museums and Archives information workshop taught by Dr. Stephanie Pyne (2021–present) and was a participant in the Uncover/Recover project developed by Bonnie Devine in partnership with OCADU and the ROM (2017–18).

• Bonnie Devine is a Toronto-based visual artist, writer, and educator whose work reflects the storytelling and image making traditions of her Anishinaabe heritage. She uses writing, sculpture, painting, video, and performance to explore issues of land, treaty, and history in installation and video works have been shown and collected nationally and internationally. Devine was a recipient of a Galleries Ontario curatorial writing award in 2024, an Ontario Lieutenant Governor’s Heritage Award in 2019 and a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2021.