WEST OF 3:00 AM | PAXTON MARONEY
Neighborhood 411 N Bishop Ave, Dallas, TX 75208
Opening Reception: 11.2.18 7pm-10pm
Exhibition Dates: 11.2.18 – 11.30.18
Paxton Maroney is a conceptual artist. Her surreal photography invites the outside world to step inside snapshots of her dreams. For several years, she has woken up from vivid dreams, often in the middle of the night, and drawn the images composed on the backs of her eyelids. At times, she even engages in lucid dreaming throughout the day as she’s “trained her brain” to create new chimera for her portraiture. Then, when she has scouted out the perfect location, she begins painstakingly reconstructing the scenes of her subliminal imagination.
For Paxton, her dreams aren’t stories so much as they are symbolic images that tend to reveal a deeper meaning. Instead, the stories are composed through bringing these images to life through her photography and then compiling them into cohesive series.
For WEST OF 3:00AM, Paxton traveled through West Texas and along the West Coast, which inspired her to photograph the contrasting environments intertwined by the concept of marking the landscape with lucid squares slicing through, resting in and defining the scale of the planes. When she visited Joshua Tree, however, her experience transitioned the work from envisioning almost solid structures to imagining a physical expression of her soul, her light, moving through the space. This same perception translated to Chino Hills and other parts of California. The abstractions began very linearly – with the square forms. Rigid yet bright. Moving into more of a sporadic pattern – neon lights characterized by the emotions she felt in the space.
“There’s more of a freedom here. Nothing is holding me back anymore. I am free to wander. This is my journey. What route will I take next?”
