P. Seth Thompson | Hypnocil dreams

Exhibition Dates: March 11- April 22, 2023

Sandler Hudson Gallery is pleased to announce its current exhibition, Hypnocil Dreams, from Chattanooga-based artist P. Seth Thompson. "Hypnocil" is a fictitious medical drug first introduced in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). The imagined FDA classification of the drug states," For sedation where dreamless sleep is considered optimal: suppression of night terrors." Thompson uses this concept as a point of origin for the work: If we do not dream in our sleep, do dreams sneak into our waking life?

With the VHS tape, the viewer gained control of playback in their home. Thompson found comfort in collecting and organizing VHS tapes; movies became a way of making sense of his world. Moreover, multiple viewings of the same film shifted his relationship with the characters. Their fictitious lives and experiences became his shared reality. Through image and sculptural appropriation, Thompson emphasizes how cinematic commodification creates reality as a "multiverse" of narratives in the viewer's mind. 

P. SETH THOMPSON was born in East Point, GA, in 1979. He received a BA in film and video from Georgia State University in 2005 and an MFA in photography from SCAD-Atlanta in 2012. Thompson has taught photography and video at Kennesaw State University and the University of Georgia. He and his husband, Robert Truan, live in Chattanooga, where they teach at the University of Tennessee.