Dreamscapes - Karen Sinsheimer

An accomplished painter by the time she reached high school, Jenny Okun received a degree in experimental media from London’s Slade School of Art and has continued to pursue a multidisciplinary approach to her art that includes photography, drawing, and film projections for the stage. Following on her best-known work—multilayered photographic interpretations of architecture produced in the camera—Dreamscapesgathers more than one hundred photographs that combine Okun’s on-location photography from around the world with masterly digital manipulation to create unique images at once familiar and otherworldly. Here are landscapes and gardens, buildings and sculpture, flora and fauna, nudes, ancient maps, and paintings reimagined in dreamlike perspectives that evoke, in the words of photography curator Karen Sinsheimer, not only these realities in themselves but Okun’s “subjective memory of experiencing them.”

“As in her earlier work,” Sinsheimer writes in her introduction toDreamscapes, “the images featured in the present volume display an evolving aesthetic that harks back to the Romantic pursuit of essence and feeling rather than realistic depiction. From Spain to Thailand, Las Vegas to Costa Rica, and England to California, the world offers Okun unlimited experiential richness. Her images of Italian gardens and villas transcend time and place, while the boogie-woogie neon rhythms of nighttime Las Vegas pulse with energy and excitement. One can hear the roar and feel the force of gushing waters in her Yosemite waterfall images, and sink into the sensuous, luxuriant beauty of the human nude, clothed or veiled or dancing in projected light forms. A silent benediction seems to emanate from the filtered light of Salisbury Cathedral’s stained-glass windows, and angelic presences reach down from their lofty perches to grace human frailty.”

Jenny Okunis a graduate of London’s Slade School of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Karen Sinsheimeris curator of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, a position she has held for more than two decades.