Preparing for Night is a scanography series exploring the dreamlife of zinnias. 

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To create the scanographs, I moved the flowers around on the scanning bed as the scan was taking place. At first, my movements were small, and the shifts in flower positions more subtle. However, as the scanning sessions progressed, I found myself manipulating the organic material of the flowers in more aggressive ways, until, eventually, I was crushing and pulverizing the zinnias, one against another, and against the scanning glass.

 

While there was a kind of weird joy and abandonment in this, it wasn’t so much that I intended to delight in being brutal. Rather, I sensed that if the dreamworlds of zinnias were to appear, they were needing a fuller range of expressiveness than their natural, intact forms and a botanical realism approach could bring forth.

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Preparing for Night reveals zinnias that have left behind their daytime garden and entered a liminal, night-time zone of dreams and nightmares. Transmogrified before the scanner's unnatural light, these flowers appear as doubled, tripled, ghostly, fractured and sumptuous dreaming versions of themselves.

 

The phrase, “preparing for night,” is taken from the book The Tibetan Yogas of Dream & Sleep – Practices for Awakening by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, which provides instructions for how a dreamer might more consciously engage with their night-time dreams to achieve liberty.  Dream-moments captured on the scanner were further clarified in Photoshop.