Dream Talk with Karla Diaz, George Bermudez and Brooke Sprowl

What happens when you bring artists psychologists and dream experts together in the same room? A dream circle of course!

Karla Diaz: Wait 'til Your Mother Gets Home features work as the result of a year of insomnia. As a stroke survivor she practices repetitive memory exercises using drawing as a tool for excavating and retaining information. In her commitment to rendering a painting every night Diaz turned to the unfiltered spontaneous imagery that surfaced during her insomnia whether dreams fantasies or memory.

Join us in a lively discussion between artist Karla Diaz and dream experts George Bermudez and Brooke Sprowl about the connection between dreaming and art making followed by a “social dreaming” circle where participants will be guided by an expert on how to interpret and analyze their own dreams.

George Bermudez has been an Associate Professor at the California School of Professional Psychology Los Angeles specializing in Multicultural Clinical Psychology; and Director of Training of a Clinical Psychology Internship accredited by the American Psychological Association. In addition Dr. Bermudez has a Certificate in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute. George Bermudez has been striving to develop and train others in a multi-dimensional integrative approach to psychological theory and practice that brings together developmental theory psychoanalysis family systems group psychology and multiculturalism.

Karla Diaz is a writer teacher and multidisciplinary artist who engages in painting installation video and performance. Using narrative to question identity institutional power and explore memory her socially engaged practice generates exciting collaborations and provokes important dialogue among diverse communities. Notably she is the co-founder of the socially engaged collective and community artist space Slanguage. Critical discourse is central to her practice as she explores social subcultural and marginalized stories. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003 and a BA from California State University Los Angeles in 1999. Her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the California Institute of Integral Studies Hammer Museum Los Angeles CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego CA; Pitzer College Claremont CA; California State University Los Angeles CA; San Jose Museum of Art CA; Institute for Contemporary Art Boston MA; Arizona State University Art Museum Tempe AZ; LAXART Hollywood CA; Hyde Park Art Center Chicago IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit MI; the Serpentine Gallery London U.K.; and Museo Casa de Cervantes Madrid Spain.

Brooke Sprowl is a UCLA-trained psychotherapist and founder of My LA Therapy with a decade of experience specializing in anxiety relationships trauma and codependency. Having studied the intricacies of the mind both through her neuroscience degree through my many years as a clinician and through her own personal 20-year journey of self-transformation she’s created a systematized framework that blends evidence-based psychotherapy peak performance and flow neuroscience and time-tested spiritual and mystical practices.

Host or Publisher 18th Street Arts Center