Idling

This article examines the work of Cree artist Brenda Draney, arguing that the apparent emptiness in her paintings paradoxically invites viewers to consider them within their immediate and longer-term historical contexts. The paintings’ spare depictions of rest call for an account of who is allowed luxuriance and who is prevented from working, what institutions and practices exist to support renewal and regeneration, and what remains after dispossession takes place. Draney’s reclining figures resonate with important theorizations of sleep by Neil Smith, Franny Nudelman, Jonathan Crary, and others, who show that rest is complexly embedded within its social conditions, but that it somehow exceeds them, too. These paintings document real circumstances, and the historical forces that brought them into being, but in depicting the crucial force for renewal, sleep, they also attest to the power and possibility of transformation.