Curatorial Contexts:
In a recent proposal for publication, Independent Curator, Trudy Wilner Stack states,

“After twenty years of creating a cycle of dream imagery conjured from her unconscious and from deep research into the science and magic of human sleep, Susan kae Grant’s long term project, Night Journey delivers a haunting shadow world of ethereal photographs. The result of a now signature studio practice, Grant first devises inky silhouettes and symbolic forms, and then invests them with emotional and psychic narrative power in seventy resonant tableaux. She frequently alters her exhibition spaces with site-specific lighting and cast shadows to bring a dimensional experience to the viewer. The Night Journey that unfolds retraces her memory and animates her fantasy in a synthesis akin to dreaming. In images that recall Victorian spiritualism, the lurking Nosferatu of F.W. Murnau, and the allegory of Plato’s Cave, the project unlocks clues to the mystery of what we see when we sleep and exposes the surreal imprint of experience. These photographs also help us traverse the strangeness and chaos of breakneck contemporary life, like the dreams that inspired them.“

Roy Flukinger, Curator Emeritus of the UT Harry Ransom Center in Austin, sums up Night Journey beautifully in his statement for PhotoNOLA,

“If you travel along with Susan Kae Grant on her “Night Journey” you may well emerge with far more questions than answers. Her images match the grand theatre of her vision and, like the stage scrim which they sometimes remind me of, once struck by light they can both reveal and obscure, delight and mystify, and present you with a familiar song that you have never heard before.”