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 and channel the bustling, crowded network of ideas and stories, profusions of love, joy, and intrigue into one cogent, electrifying vision in Medicine for the Soul. He stated:

“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. It features an effervescent pink figment pirouetting under a spotlight before an empty auditorium. The work’s description reads:

“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 events and timelines that are disparate from our own, helping release any present fears we hold in exchange for a sense of prevailing belief that we are not only seeing this at the exact moment we need to, but that we are truly meant to be here.

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 intrinsically wrong with this tendency—in fact, it has provided us with the terrain of culture that is more diverse and abundant than ever—but it does give varying weight to those showing evidence of a singular hand in their work, seeking to truly create rather than iterate.

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 vanguards, that Sleepr truly shimmers in singularity.

Sleepr’s work is inherently unreplicable because itnecessitates an amalgam of serious physical decisions, pushing the body and mind over all known limits, technical exactitude, ongoing scholarship, and unrelenting devotion to dismantling a number of stigmas that surround the categories of psychedelia and digital art—all in an effort to “pick open the ultimate lock” that reveals a cosmos of previously unseen “ infrastructure” and infinite wonder lying dormant in our cognition. We find ourselves on a challenging-to-grasp yet satisfying climb to demystify this class that his work sits in, which has established links to an intersection of emerging subcultural movements between psychedelia and neuroscience, digital art, blockchain technology, and decentralized finance.

All this alone appears to be new, unfamiliar ground, which shouldn’t be a surprise for an artist who is captured by the notion of creating something genuinely novel. And novelty—a key operative word in Sleepr’s practice and what he understands about both the uniqueness of his perspective and its relationship to a larger collective history of efforts in the arts and sciences—is something that is becoming a seemingly rarer occurrence these days. It may be one of the real keys to both the neural and creative contributions he is uncovering.

Sleepr has asserted, “Repetition is easy; novelty is tricky. Artists are in the business of novelty generation. They are the tip of the cultural spear. They foreshadow years ahead into the next waves of who we are all becoming. To understand the way in which novelty generation occurs in the brain would be the true singularity, for it would unlock all future ideas.”

Secrets and destiny

Within the evolution of Sleepr’s practice, you can trail a succession of new advancements and technical break throughs, and in this debut solo exhibition, Secrets, comprising twelve of his first ever physical works, his ever-exacerbating dexterity in which space, light, form, pattern, story, emotion, and collapsing dimensions is rendered, reaches a new all-time high. Each work is presented as an elegant secret itself; first, neatly packaged with a satin bow, then slowly, systematically, and chaotically unraveling, opening up to reveal multitudes of new textures and startling aspects in hidden spaces. Sleepr takes us on an enchanted odyssey, converging artifacts of a bygone time with entities separated from time entirely, leading us through childhood bedrooms, bioluminescent jungles, blooming treasure chests, forgotten underworlds, and playgrounds that undulate and breathe.

The collection diversely assembles this private world of visions as well as the very secrets the artist has carried with him in his alter ego. It is intended to dismiss a “shamanic implicit belief” that what occurs on “the other side” must remain separated from our perceived reality and off limits for the ordinary public to view. As a result, the collection of work gallantly moves in every direction, hovering between our familiar world and the secret one with a kind of confidence that defyingly teases, dismantles, and grins in mischief.

It is compelling how the resolution of Sleepr’s work continues to reach piercing clarity, shifting from flattening all aspects to just two-dimensional planes of color to now thriving in crisper three-dimensional spaces. This series allows for both to coexist in a methodical under- taking that achieves such dynamism, uncanny realism, and spiritual depth that you cannot help but feel as though you really are peeling back the curtain, only to fall right on center stage.

You might expect that—as it is for most artists—the focal point of that stage might be a reflection of the sole creator, of Sleepr himself. But in this case, it is not. Arguably, it is us. Sleepr’s resolute decision to maintain his anonymity permits his visions to emerge lucidly from mist, like a paralyzing dream in which we are invited to be central characters rather than bystanders at its extraordinary events. When we ultimately transcend all its ambiguity, we can see it for what it is: a moment of triumph we have been waiting for and a sublime life fully lived.

I feel the deepest sense of reverence for the magic that Sleepr weaves over us through his work, and an even greater sense of gratitude for being able to help shepherd others towards the great parade of his artistic oeuvre. This parade is the highest celebration of being human, as it retrieves ceaseless, bewitching ways of keeping us in awe of the elemental constituents that make up our very being.

Perhaps Sleepr’s work ensnares the highest fundamental truth about our deepest longings, the things that continue to nudge us and shape our self-belief through repetition. It resolves that elusive, secret suspicion that we made a promise to ourselves and the universe to be the very thing that frightens us most, a thing of unique beauty and imperfection, destiny continuously unfolding. When I sit with Sleepr’s work, I no longer suspend disbelief. I accept that we will always have internal guides through this journey. We are not lost—magic illuminates the long track ahead. But you already know this, because we have done this forever now; we have been on this trip, or some version of it, many, many times before.

Naomi Bu is an artist agent, collector, and co-founder of the digital artist representation agency Scene, based in London.