my rapid eye movements

Dreams, a very common theme in art history, were depicted as a religious experience in the Renaissance, while they took on a more personal tone with the Romantics in the 18th century, bringing subjectivity to the fore. In the next century, the Symbolists placed the dream at the core of their art, while the Surrealists in the first half of the 20th century saw dreams as an experiment that took them to the border of the visible and the invisible. The subject of dreams, which is still ubiquitous in works of art produced today, is also at the center of Melda Yaramış’s practice. The series “My Rapid Eye Movements”, in which she traces the strange objects, moments and places in her dreams for about five years, points to the dreaming phase of sleep (REM, or “Rapid Eye Movement”). 

The artist started her compositions with the idea of creating a collection of drawings and three-dimensional objects she made using different materials such as insulating material, ceramics, watercolor, mud and artificial leather. The artist examines the superficial and shallow sides of the subconscious with the data and images she collects, following her curiosity about the imagery of the strange plots fictionalized in the complex structure of the subconscious, the objects that appear in the details and the uncanny characters in the three-dimensional world.

Michel Foucault pointed out that dreams are not just a source of inspiration that ignites the imagination when he said, “To dream is not another way of experiencing another world, it is for the dreaming subject the radical way of experiencing its own world”. Just like in Melda Yaramış’s series, which inevitably takes on a surrealist mood from time to time, dreams and the images and stories she sees in her dreams are also part of her quest for herself.

* Dream, Imagination, and Existence, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19 (1984-85):1

Mamut Art Project | Melda Yaramış