WINDOW SPACE
THE SLEEP OF REASON
SIMON MACEWAN
The Sleep of Reason by Simon MacEwan is an exhibition of utopias gone to seed; strange beasts wander an incongruous landscape of ruined buildings while down below obscure machinery rusts slowly in the dark.
These drawings and collages take as their starting point 19th century engravings from illustrated encyclopaedias. The engraved line gives a certain uniformity to the images; whether of elephants or microscopes, just as the encyclopaedias they came from aimed to create a framework by which all knowledge could be ordered.
Much as the sleep of reason produces monsters, without the rationalising framework of the encyclopaedia these images bleed together, forming a chaotic dreamworld haunted by the ghost of a lost order.
