Feeling (y)our way in the dark: An interview with Jenny Perlin

The Long Sleepers, also exhibited in part at Simon Preston Gallery, New York (2017), is a long-term artistic project involving 16mm film, video, performance, and drawings. The current iteration tracks downwards through a sinkhole to discover a cavern hidden deep beneath the earth's surface. This hole is the line of communication through which affect is able to travel from underground to the surface, through darkness, light, silence, trust, fear, disorientation and transformation. Wandering through this suspended subterranean warren reveals episodes that connect long sleepers in characters from German folktales that find their way into early American literature, elements from Greek myth intersecting with Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, novels by Jules Verne and traces of my own personal history in underground spaces.