The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends.

— Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man, 1933

After a while, I started hallucinating, and developed a tumor. I believe the visions caused the tumor, and not the other way around.

— Brian O’Blivion, Videodrome, 1983

Will Thornton manifested his current role of artist. He culled it from his dreams. He and his wife were attempting to conceive while he was cutting hair for a living in Charleston, South Carolina, and he felt unfulfilled and underpaid by his profession. So in 2019, he decided to devote himself to becoming a commissioned portrait painter for wealthy Southern families (it is good money, and de rigueur in those parts), and he loved portraits in the grand manner, like those of John Singer Sargeant and Harold Speed (also de rigueur in those parts). Hours upon hours in his home studio with friends and youtube tutorials revealed him to have real talent. Then the pandemic hit. 

Suddenly, Thornton found it impossible to find live humans to sit for him, nor did he want them to. They and a yet-unidentified army of antigens could kill him, his wife, and the child they wished to bring into the world. In the twilight between dreams and wakefulness, he saw his future baby, but he also saw the terrors that come with introducing one into the world, the pestilence and death lurking around every corner. He envisioned the baby, the invisible plague, the fear that the baby might never materialize, all these horrors and desires lumped together into anthropomorphic masses, bound by leather, yarn, clay, and viscous material. He chased these figures out of the ether into tangible reality, he molded them from memory with the same leather, yarn, clay, and viscous material he saw in his hypnagogic states. These figures became fertility idols for he and his wife, worry dolls to absolve his anxieties, and subjects for him to paint.

Will Thornton: Hypnagogic Sex Idols is a collection of portraits of contemporary hopes and consternations pinned to the wall before they metastasize internally, allowing the good parts to thrive and shooing-away the bad ones. The works are fertile origin stories à la the Venus of Willendorf combined with the boogeyman. Painted in a style reminiscent of Spanish Baroque masters like Diego Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera, the bodies in this body of work squirt, shudder, and tremble under dramatic compositional chiaroscuro. This is exhibition-as-exorcism, this is exhibition-as-baby shower.

— Ben Lee Ritchie Handler