Sleepy Haven’s mottled, fissured surfaces resemble nothing so much as a body, its solarized apertures imparting a hallucinatory beauty which threatens always to break apart entirely the skin of its material support, pitilessly stretched across their fantastical recline. Asleep, the bodies offer themselves up to the gaze of the beholder, the film’s daydream structure suggesting that their minds are elsewhere drifted far from these emptied tissues and ligaments, the better to offer themselves as vehicles of fantasy and projection. The long dream of the image world, depicted here as a reverie in stasis, a sleepy haven, is both conjured and deconstructed, made to reveal the stress fractures which result when the aims of everyday life are made to rub up against the dream factory.

Mike Hoolboom