Have you ever experienced sleep paralysis? And in that waking dream, you find yourself frozen onto your bed while a shadow figure looks on, and no matter how you try you cannot run away or even look away? Then you wake up, anxious and unnerved, and try to tuck that shadow figure back into your subconscious.

Though no matter how much we try to avoid and bury our shadows, they will always remain attached to us, will always manifest themselves in one way or another, because they are integral aspects of ourselves that must be acknowledged.

For his solo exhibition, Dave Lock undergoes a process of shadow work by etching onto black pastel figures. The artist sees the gesture of etching as akin to unearthing—to find what shapes us, to find the source of our traumas and other aspects of ourselves that we have been conditioned to repress. The resulting figures merge The Shadow with the present Self, as a visualization of wholeness.

-Pam Quinto