Vaka Valo - Dream Diary

This is an ongoing project that began in 2006 after a chance encounter with the ouija board in a garage.

Summer was hot that year and I remember sister yelling for me to keep away from her room.
We used to make ouija boards ourselves and we used to share a dream diary.
First I would have it for several weeks, recording what I remember from the fever dreams during that time of my illness, then sister would borrow it and record her dreams, then I, and so forth.

One day, I saw a few of the pages were missing, but she said she did not take them.
I believed her.
She could lie, but she wouldn't lie about this.
It was too serious of a matter.
To both of us.

That night in the garage, I made a ouija board and asked where the missing pages had went, but instead of an answer in words, it asked me to use the pages from an old instruction manual that was sitting in the small loft of the garage.

I cut out and removed page after page after page and fanned them in a giant pile across the floor of the garage.
The planchette then slid to one piece, then across the pile to another.
I combined them and held them up in the dim light of the garage and immediately saw the two unrelated images superimposed upon one another in an unusual composition.
It was a man using a green rolling pin to flatten the head of another man, who held a red stick to the ground.
They were in a garage.
I then realised it was my garage.

This activity went on night after night that summer.
I bought more instructional manuals and brought them to the garage.
I kept careful track of each of the components the board would slide to, then began making collages from the various combinations.
Weeks went by, sometimes months, and the board wouldn't move the slightest.
Then there would be shorter periods of heightened activity from it.
I kept recording what the board showed me.
Later, I recreated the collages large and changed all of the colours on a fancy computer.
And now they are prints…

-Vaka Valo, 2019

Courtesy of Gerrish Fine Art