NEW YORK—The husband-and-wife team of Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are among the more exciting young artists to have emerged in the area of electronic arts in the last couple of decades. Their latest exhibition, “Directed Dreaming,” opened at Postmasters Gallery in New York on March 4.

It comprises a series of complex, kinetic sculptures that are covered with tiny tableaux that they call "fragmentary, miniature film sets." An array of tiny cameras are trained on these tableaux, and, as part of each installation, a sequence of greatly enlarged images are projected on to a wall of the gallery. The works are at once funny, bizarre and somewhat worrying. Immediately after the opening at Postmasters, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy spoke to ArtInfo about their work.

Kevin and Jennifer, how would you begin to introduce these new pieces to someone who was coming to your work for the first time?

[Kevin] They are a series of works that present a subjective portrait of anxiety. This is the theme that we’re dealing with.

And the title that you’ve given them, Directed Dreaming—as I understand it, that’s a psychiatric technique?

[Jennifer] Yes. It’s probably a little bit more suspect than some others, but the idea is that you suggest to a patient that they think about a certain situation before they go to sleep, and in their dreams the situation can be resolved, or they can learn things that will help them in their waking life. We've inverted it a little bit in this project in that things from waking life invade the dream. So instead of a resolution, we leave the question open as to how the dream world parallels your actual life. It becomes a hybrid terrain of events from your life, dream images that are pure fantasy, historical and contemporary world events, and film images and TV images.

And those things from the cinematic world, that’s a kind of imagery you’ve used before, isn’t it?

[Jennifer] Exactly. We made up meta-films with very strong filmic references, but using a reduced language. Then we hit upon the idea of including representations of ourselves in the work in order to ground the spectator. Then in a show that we did in Italy last May, we changed that completely and started restaging mundane events from our life. It was really important to us that something as ordinary as sleeping could open out into the world of fantasy. The dream sequence that we came up with was amazing to me because it’s so much richer than most dream sequences that you encounter. It’s not tied to a narrative event, and we don’t have to foreshadow anything or resolve anything in the dream.

[Kevin] And I think that the dream space that we depict can be a stand-in for all kinds of things. Before we were dealing mainly with overtly cinematic concepts, and now the environment from the world of cinema has been replaced by this dream world, but there are strong analogies between those two worlds.

Can you say what you mean by that?

[Kevin] The idea of trying to determine your relationship to a fantasy world (which is implied by the idea of directed dreaming) is as applicable to mass-media and pop culture as much as it is to the unconscious space of dreams.

Yes, it seems to me that the real issues at play in your work are less to do with the specifics of television or film, or dreaming in this case, but rather the larger questions around reality and representation. How do we represent things, and is that representation the same thing as constructing a reality?

[Kevin] Yes, I think that’s exactly right. We started thinking about the confluence between the subjective and objective, and about how reality is constructed.

[Jennifer] And we really tried to exploit the materiality of what we’re working with in that way as well. Instead of inventing or sculpting everything, we’ve worked with the sculptural materials in a more or less ‘found-footage’ way. We’ve brought together things from train kits and other things from dolls’ houses. They are prefabricated, but we customize them as much as we need to.