宁静睡眠 Halcyon Sleep

The artist Rodney Graham, wearing his pyjamas, is filmed in blue nocturnal light, knocked out by a sleeping draught called halcyon. Comatose in the back of a car, he has been taken from his motel bed and driven around Vancouver, the traffic and city lights flaring over his recumbent form. Halcyon Sleep (1994) is the first work the viewer encounters in the major survey of Graham's work that opens today at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery. Attracted by the word halcyon, and remembering the childhood experience of being driven home after an exciting day, Graham not only recreates a memory of his youth, but shows us a man in the cinema of his dreams.