Richard Pilnick
Ltd.

Transient Surreality is a journey we embark on together—a shared inquiry into the nature of self, space, and time. This project began with a single image: a large-format photograph of a New York hotel bed, born from a desire for purposeless creation. From that solitary image, our exploration has grown, uncovering the hotel bed as both object and symbol, embodying layers of experience suspended between anonymity and intimacy, memory and transience. Together, we enter a sequence of images that invites us to question presence, absence, and the fluidity of identity.

As the project has unfolded, so too has the approach to image-making, moving from empty frames to self-portraits and employing digital techniques that freeze the body mid-motion—seeking moments where the familiar transforms into the fantastical. Here, the hotel bed becomes a surreal stage, a place where identity and consciousness can be examined and reimagined. Our shared gaze meets the recurring figure in a white bathrobe—a deliberately anonymous garment that both conceals and reveals. Together, we confront identity’s paradoxes, recognising the bathrobe as a kind of uniform that allows us to explore the personal through the universal.

In this journey, we draw from the ideas of Freud and Jung, navigating spaces where dream and waking life overlap, where the conscious and unconscious intermingle. The hotel room becomes an oddly fitting setting for our collective reflection—a place for both isolation and shared experience, where we approach the boundaries of the self within a liminal, surreal space.

In Transient Surreality, the hotel bed becomes more than a transient place; it is a portal, a stage where selfhood is freed from time and place. Through these images, we explore what it means to inhabit a space that is at once ordinary and otherworldly, a sanctuary and a site of existential inquiry. Here, memory, temporality, and identity are fluid, inviting us to consider the self beyond the familiar.

Ultimately, Transient Surreality is an invitation for us to step together into that suspended space between the ephemeral and the enduring. In these moments, perhaps we catch glimpses of a shared consciousness—a space where our own dualities and new ways of seeing can emerge. We are invited, as both creators and viewers, to experience these surreal, transient spaces that we all, however briefly, inhabit.