Lured down the rabbit hole

Coming to know Sleepr's work before knowing the artist felt as though a track had been carefully laid before me, and I was following it like a sequence of clues. Speaking with others who know and appreciate his work, we have all experienced a sense that we are now part of unravelling a colossal mystery.

Sleepr's work embodies the quintessential question we ask when looking at art: "What does it mean?" The works are direct glimpses of impossible places and beyond comprehensible dreams, with exotics smuggled into writhing, patterned rooms where mirages combust and flutter between figurative and abstract. Rattling, high-volume colors are flattened into forbidding planes of dimension that ground and uproot us at the same time, masterfully twisting the rules to destabilize our assumptions. The work is elusive, visceral, genre-spanning, and conceptually spellbinding—if you just surrender and let the artist assure you that nothing is what it seems. These places Sleepr has been trying to reveal exceed language. Their meanings are less a solution to a problem but more a mirror to express our remarkable capacity to visualize things beyond words, beyond logic. In all his work and throughout his life, he revels in this fact, boldly declaring that magic is real, arranging visions so convincing and rigorous that we all have to ask ourselves if the illusion is the truth itself.

Discovering the other side

I remember the first time I saw Sleepr's work, one fall evening years ago. The shortcomings of immediate, deep impact in the digital form had begun to steadily subvert then; the air around me seemed a strange color, and an energy started to pervade and leap through the screen —scintillating light, movement, and form felt material. A door, which had been left open just enough for someone to stroll past online, appeared before me as if it had been situated there all along.

This is the phenomenon of discovering art born in the obscurities of the digital domain. We become explorers and excavators of cultural goods deserving deeper examination. In my experience, it encourages authenticity as our ordinary identities recede into the background and new freedoms from the rational world are found in a virtual one. While some may trivialize this distance between reality and cyber life, we have everything to gain in believing that both possibilities existing today facilitate the dissemination of art and the creations of contemporary artists.

Over the coming months and years, as I became more engaged in the digital art sector, I devoured Sleepr's work. I stood at the ledge of that door, and as I peered closer through that doorway came an awareness—not the knowledge, for this wasn't verbal, metaphorical, or abstract—but a recognition that I was being lured by a voice that brought striking legibility to our wildest hallucinations. In these newfound portals they lead me to, I find what appears to be our most ancient past collapsing with the modern milieu, elementally belong there. In fact, they have always been there.

The artist and the person

Fundamentally, this is what great art can elicit. It summons us to rise to the formidable occasion of observing ourselves, broadening our sympathies and ennobling our small place in this world. And if we're really lucky, we are transported away from an artwork feeling more unified with the universe than where we started. In this case, Sleepr's universe as we know it has been meticulously constructed through a lifelong, solitary effort to document the undocumentable, relating the exotic secrets of the spirit world accessible only by high-dose psychedelic states.

It became clear when I first spoke to Sleepr a year after I had discovered his work that this was a person who spent his whole life habituating corners where very few had been, and any attempt at providing anecdotes about it was like untangling a series of the tightest knots. He speaks slowly, leaving long pauses between words, carefully chosen. He does not miss a single chance to provide full dignity to his experiences on "the other side."

It appeared to be painstaking and isolating; a cost wornpersonally to ensure others could see the new vantage point. Thousands of hours spent over a decade inside the visionary world, studying and engaging with "extrasensory perception" to fully embody the visions before actualizing them into images. His effort to archive the impossible is uncompromising. It results in a kind of metamorphosis that reconfigures every particle of his being, enabling us as the audience to receive more than what we are typically able to perceive as we, too, experience transformation in viewing it.

This gradual, personal experience of transformation suddenly became widely explicit at the end of 2023. During an artist residency at Art Basel Miami, Sleepr, a vehemently anonymous artist, found himself within a semi-opaque plexiglass box, donned in a white and gold Venetian mask, a black cocktail jacket, and black gloves, speaking directly to his viewers for the very first time. Spectators were privy to his artistic process through a screen outside the box, which was placed behind an illuminated ruby-red telephone indicating, Pick up the phone and talk to Sleepr.

This interactive performance ran for five days from the confines of a small box in the middle of a crowded fair and facilitated long lines of curious attendees. Later, it would be revealed that over 500 conversations had taken place between the public and the anonymous artist—a testament to an individual pushing the limits on his values of authenticity, anonymity, integrity, and connectivity. He later recalled that during this process, he had become a "complete conduit" between the viewer and the work for the first time, listening blindly on the phone for hours each day to capture the essence of their experience.

"For someone whose external image is so tightly controlled, this was the uncontrolled public's way of seeping through the locked doors and into my heart. It was the same ego death that happens in the maloca or in a bedroom—I became interconnected with everything again."

While Sleepr's commitment to his practice demands removal of the self and individual identity, it is also sincerely human. His belief is that the work is deeply significant, not as a personal legacy, but more broadly contributing to the expansion of understanding and capability of our species. It allows him to connect with others in a way that gently urges them to act, to be heroic in the minutiae of the everyday, to pick up the phone, to see in full technicolor, to notice the branch reaching the light, and to bite the apple it has created, embracing whatever danger or paradise is on the other side.

Cultural relevance, novelty, and singularity

There is a Sleepr artwork that I often find myself returning to: You Are the Star. It creeps into my mind casually some days, or when I am up late at night worrying about missed accomplishments that wait to be provoked or realized. Incidentally, I thought about it when writing this.

"Can you see what I'm doing? Watch me closely. I'm teaching you through my forms. I'm playing and dancing. I'm being the best me. I want you to fulfill your destiny. I want you to realize the secret. You are the star of the show. You are the one."

Bound to every Sleepr work is a description that evokes the ghostly outline of someone watching you noticing their manifestation. The works are intended to be beacons of clues we may not yet understand the full significance of in the present. They unmask the trace of an inventor playing with the rules of reality.

In trying to put your finger on the pulse of the current cultural zeitgeist, you might meander long enough to notice that we are coming to grips with a postmodern proclivity towards reiteration, irreverent appropriation, and remixing references of what has been done before. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does make us wonder about the future of art and what it means to be truly novel.

Whether we like it or not, we are living in the wilderness of an increasingly memetic, virtual world. Nothing may go on undigitized and copied. And it is here, where it feels as though the art world is perpetually wriggling in a saturated swamp of "next big things" and technological innovations, that Sleepr's work stands out as a singular voice.