Li Shen

A Play on Dreams

There’s no such thing as photographing a dream. I have tried. 

Within dreams I distinctly remember pointing my camera, but I never remember the image I make. I can’t dredge anything concrete from the fuzzy jumble of dreamed experience when awake.

To me, dreams represent one end of a spectrum that extends from the unconscious process of dreaming into fully wakeful activity. I spent a significant amount of time as a child daydreaming and imagining a fanciful private world. Many of us experience visions that emerge from the subconscious at odd times, or inspirations triggered by a random association. Play is an embodiment of conscious and directed imagination that is too often neglected in our adult lives.

This terrain is the fertile in-between ground from whence comes the material for this series. Attempting to translate these fruits of imagination into photographic images is my form of play. The top of the bedroom dresser becomes a stage on which I assemble a parade of illusory scenes in miniature.

In this world of make-believe, objects can fly, suspended on threads against backdrops of painted paper. As in dreams, nothing is real, and nothing is entirely serious. But the creative choices that make up each image are in fact manifestations of the subconscious. They come from the same mysterious and overlooked inner world that gives birth to dreams.

Artist Bio

Li Shen grew up in London, UK and came to the US as a biomedical researcher. After a stint in Cleveland she relocated to the Upper Connecticut Valley (NH and VT) where she found space to tap into her artistic side.

After ten years of hand-building ceramics her arts interest turned to making sculpture in mixed media and metal, including wire weaving and welding. Her work has been shown in various group shows at AVA gallery in Lebanon, NH, and at Alwun House in Phoenix AZ. She was a frequent contributor to the Woodstock VT SculptureFest and Spirit of Place in Huntingdon, VT. Her work was also featured in site-specific sculpture shows at the Carving Studio in West Rutland (1999), Helen Day Art Center, Stowe VT, Blythewold Arboretum, Rhode Island (1996) and  Kansas City Art Institute (1998).

In the mid-2000’s she began teaching herself digital photography that quickly became her medium of choice. Her photographic work has juried into numerous group shows at Darkroom Gallery, Essex Junction, VT and PhotoPlace Galley, Middlebury, VT. Most recently she held a solo show of her photographs at AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH.  Li is also a writer and contributes weekly cultural and news articles to Sidenote, a hyperlocal news outlet centered on her home town of Thetford, VT.