A Summer Night’s Dream

David James Sibbitt

Year2024

MediumOil on Canvas

Dimensions 130 × 86 cm

Price$35000 USD

A Summer Night’s Dream comes from my memories of being a teenager and sneaking into drive-in movies with friends - those summer nights were filled with scary movies, mischief, and the awkward discoveries of growing up. The title is a slightly revised version from a Shakespeare play, and I let some of his world wander into mine. Cupid appears with his arrows, while Bottom, transformed into an ass, stands among a cast of characters displaced from different moments in time. On the screen, my version of an image from the movie, Jaws, unfolds as I sit in a station wagon with my friends. Nearby, one of my incredible Berkeley mentors, Joan Brown, enters the scene offering a Magritte apple. Like Shakespeare’s play, reality becomes slightly unhinged. Memory, desire, fear and imagination overlap until time itself seems to disappear.