Clement Page’s recent work has explored sleep-related anomalies, including sleep paralysis and somnambulism. This exhibition focuses on the latter, combining Page’s film Sleepwalker, 2005, with production photographs from an earlier film, Unknown Disturbance, 2004, that depict a sleepwalking girl wandering through the corridors and rooms of the Trafalgar Hotel in London. Sleepwalker is a two-screen installation, projected onto adjacent walls of the gallery: On the left, we watch a man wandering around a disused building and then outdoors, in what can be assumed to be a dream, while on the right we see the physical effects of this dream on his sleeping—and later sleepwalking—body. Gradually, the sleepwalker’s movements begin mirroring the ones in his dream, and the man is found wandering in derelict areas of the nocturnal city. Both settings—“the dream” and “real life”—refer back to Page’s earlier photographic series, “Topologies.” Contrary to the conventions of narrative cinema, Page’s film does not come to a conclusion, encouraging in the viewer the feeling of anxiety that pervades the scenes. Blurring the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, Page’s work is perplexing and psychologically charged, a true illustration of Freud’s notion of the uncanny.
