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DREAM SCREEN

MFA Thesis Exhibition

Maggie Murphy

 

November 17 -21, 2026

Reception: Friday, November 20th, 7-9p

 

Dream Screen is a schoolyard pretend wedding between my adult and child selves. We exchange plastic Pretty Pretty Princess rings and, as vows, chant to each other, “I’m okay and you’re okay, I’m okay and you’re okay,” back and forth, over and over. I can see this scene so vividly in my mind, as if I dreamed about it last night. And if I try hard enough, I can convince myself it is a concrete memory I actually have: my time-traveling grown-up self showing up on the playground and asking me to marry her, as real as my memories of recitals and talent shows and birthday parties. This is because I experience my mind as a movie theater, where my dreams, memories, and imagination are playing on repeat, and for me, these psychic experiences are totally mutable—all constantly mixing together and shifting between states of certainty and precariousness, validity and delusion. As a child, this sense of unreality lent itself to a deeply-held belief that I had secret powers, that I was being chased by people in white masks, that an angel lived on my ceiling and protected me from harm. And as an adult, while I still believe that my thoughts can alter the world around me, I now recognize it as maladaptive magical thinking that stems from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or is it? Because, actually, maybe it’s all real; maybe my powers are still alive and active. 

The idea of the “dream screen” comes from psychoanalytic theory. It’s the screen on which we project our dreams when we go to sleep, whether it's a surface we actually see or the underlying matrix upon which our dreams appear. I chose this concept as the name for my exhibition because my work externalizes the moving images I see on that screen in my mind and brings them into three dimensions. Glitchy plastic televisions become portals for hand-drawn, looping reveries. Archival home videos are subjected to additive and subtractive alterations, exposing how easily I can edit and sanitize my memories over time, while original footage attempts to manifest my dream logic as viewers traverse uncanny, empty landscapes. Encrusted mound sculptures and suspended textile partitions translate childhood impulses of accumulation, adornment, hide-and-seek, and fort-building into physical barriers against real and imagined threats to body and psyche. By taking apart and re-activating the toys and technologies of my youth, I can work through my fraught relationships with both normal make-believe and unhealthy superstition. Likewise, reworking my memories with crayons and stickers, constructing a psychic storm shelter out of quilts, and translating my own self-soothing form into armored mounds allows me to showcase what my powers can do. In the end, entering this show is the same as stepping inside my personal daydreams and secret hideouts—and we’re all totally okay as long as we stay there. I’m okay and you’re okay.

 

Maggie Murphy was born in Neptune, NJ in 1985.

Learn more | IG: @m_ggi_m_rphy

 
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