Back to Exhibitions
ExhibitionArt Vault archive
Alex Pardee - Dream Bleeder
Harman Projects is pleased to announce Dream Bleeder an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Pardee.
For hundreds of years, nightmares were classified as a disease…and even a documented cause of death.
There was no known medical cure for nightmares.
But, according to legend, there was another way.
The first edition of “Occult World”, published in 1889, featured a single page dedicated to an object known only as a “Dreambleeder”.
“dreambleeder” (drem-blē’der), n. An enchanted instrument said to tear a nightmare from the mind... and drag it into the natural world.
The page was mysteriously removed from subsequent editions of the book and no record of a Dreambleeder had ever been published again.
I believed the story ended there.
I was wrong.
Last week, the HISTORY CHANNEL finally aired its special presentation about my long personal history with Dreambleeders and Dream-bleeding and where it has led me to. If you missed it, you can check it out right here:
Simultaneously, I had been preparing to create a brand new art gallery exhibition, my first in NEW YORK CITY! And I was struggling with conceptualizing what the subject of my art show was going to focus on. But upon diving back into this Dreambleeder research, the inspiration came back like the cat in Pet Sematary. And, just like that cat, this new inspiration was even more twisted than before.
That being said, my new art show “DREAMBLEEDER” (which opens May 30th - June 27th At Harman Projects in NYC) is visually and narratively inspired by the journal and research of Cody Lamport, a 19-year old college student in Las Vegas who died on Christmas morning, 1995 from unknown circumstances. Shortly before his death, Cody had stumbled upon more information about Dreambleeders than anyone on the internet, and this (alleged) journal was only recently uploaded and shared to Reddit by an unknown source. But it was enough to get my brain racing. Here are some excerpts from that journal.
This research fueled my spiral of excitement, and one thing led to another. As I started scribbling, writing and visualizing the paintings I was going to create for my exhibition, I kept digging up more evidence, like ONE of only TWO known documented Dreambleeding procedures captured on film. The other one is still lost media. You can watch that here:
My research continues, but my art show opening is drawing closer by the day. On May 30th (at HARMAN PROJECTS in NYC), I am so excited (is that the right word?) to finally show you, for the first time, a REAL Dreambleeder…
