The Recurring Dream is a large-scale panoramic painting measuring 8 ft. high, 12 ft in diameter (2.44m high X 3.66m diameter). It depicts the famous dream sequence from The Manchurian Candidate (1962); in this scene, Frank Sinatra’s character, Major Bennet Marco, is having a horrific recurring nightmare. The camera slowly pans 360º around the room, transforming an elderly women’s meeting on hydrangeas into a brutal Communist display of mind-control, with a theater full of communist brass waiting to see a hypnotized American sergeant kill two of his own men. The ambiguity of this scene mixes perception and hallucination, which was not only at the center of the language of nineteenth century panoramic painting, but also refers to current media practices in fabricating patriotic and illusory perceptions of conflict and torture. The 9-sided structure that houses The Recurring Dream creates an industrial, masculine, perhaps threatening presence, but the first thing the viewer sees, upon entering the space, is a group of harmless older women looking in their direction, implicating the viewer into the space. With this project I wanted to make a work that engaged the viewer through an intimidating scale, as well as an intimate process, that lured viewers inside the painting, and thus into the dream. As Laura Mulvey has written in Death at 24 Frames a Second, there is a growing fetishizing of the cinematic fragment as worthy artifacts that have forever changed the way film will be experienced. Everyone with a remote control is a film editor. Recreating these particular frames in oil paint, creates an additional step removed from the film. ‘further fetishizing the post-production process’, and allowing the paint to perform the task of remodeling the narrative in a new form.
