Dreaming Animals: Stephanie Berry
April 19 - May 24
When: April 19 – May 24, 2025
Where: Owen Gallery
The first story was a dream. Long before complex language, or tools, our deepest ancestors were dreaming. I would even argue that dreamwork––communal dreamwork in particular––is one of the foundations for the development of art, ritual, and culture.
In our technological age, dreaming has been reduced to nighttime brain activity. But as a lifelong student of dreamwork, I understand dreaming as an essential practice that connects us with a deeper experience of life and puts us in conversation with spiritual forces.
Many of my most potent dreams have been dreams of animals. When we dream of animals, we have entered a deep place in the dreamworld, for we have left our human-centric world and entered a forest filled with other ways of knowing and being. These are the dreams that wildly inspire us, or shake us loose of our moorings, and deliver us to the mystery of life.
My exhibition, Dreaming Animals, will explore dreamwork specifically through the lens of these potent animal dreams. Mining my many journals, of both dreams and mystical experiences in nature, I will explore not only my own dreams but also imagine what our animal kin may be dreaming. This exhibition seeks to assert not only the importance of dreaming as a human practice but also bear witness to the profound evolutionary significance of dreaming as a biological necessity that strengthens the web of consciousness in which we are enmeshed.