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Artwork Description

Lying down is the human horizontal posture par excellence. Nonetheless, for decades cinema barely showed people sleeping, with a few sporadic, comedic exceptions. 'The Big Sleep' assembles still frames of people performing this activity arranged in the form of a spiral. A figure that has been used in film to represent falling asleep and entering the realm of dreams, or even hypnosis—in other words, swirling down into different experiences of reality. In Bonillas’ work the characters seem to be dreaming about each other, based on the conventions of how sleep has been portrayed historically on screen. The spiral is further developed with all six panels coming together on the wall, composing a pattern reminiscent of quilts, a geometric textile composition that has always been connected to the comfort of sleep.