Shawna Lemay

I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I__ a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.

Yet I never sought what is real, yearned for the real, but rather I have yearned for dreams more than solid things. I can say I love the textures of dreams. The way they hover and almost taste. The clouds and darkness that linger behind, mostly unseen. And the palette of dreams. You can almost taste the colours, they seem as words on the tip of the tongue, unsayable as pomegranate seeds, unsayable as thick cream, the darkness of such a thick cream. This is why I am obsessed with dreams. They know what we cannot. Night after night they try and tell us the impossible. Dreams are secret and closed, and also contain everything, gushing, splayed open. Dream suitcases, carpetbags, hold-alls. They influence us secretly and they draw me to travel to nowhere, to beauty__ passage, through halls of mirrors where I know I am not myself, I know I am sublime.

How to recognize what is real? To know the layers and depths of oneself, to know how to open, to know how to fill a capacious hold-all, to know one__ own quirks and nervous twitches, cravings and transparencies, and, above all the force, literally the force, of events, connections, the wild calm in every thing.