Does 3am represent the current zeitgeist? At this dread hour, there's doubt that the day will ever come, a<br>sense of reaching the nadir, of being in a dark place. The mind falters and slides. It's a time for nightmares,<br>ghouls and nocturnal creatures, of loneliness and death. It's the shadow side of our daylight existence,<br>lawless and demonic. But 3am is also a time for refuge and release, for dreams and adventure, creativity<br>and imagination.<br><br>This book accompanies an exhibition of the same name, curated by Angela Kingston, and features work<br>by over 20 contemporary artists who step into the night to create paintings, drawings, videos, photographs<br>and other artworks that reflect this strange, numinous hour, between the last traces of day and the first<br>glimmer of morning.<em> 3am: Wonder, paranoia and the restless night </em>drips with insomnia. It needs to keep<br>different hours. It is an adolescent running free, a man alone and afraid, a woman gazing at the cosmos,<br>an unexpected coupling, an emboldened fox.<br><br>Edited by Bryan Biggs, the book combines images with texts by writers, from Robert Louis Stevenson to<br>Robert Macfarlane, who have conjectured the far night as something extraordinary, and includes a new<br>short story by Ailsa Cox. Artists featured include Francis Alÿs, Jordan Baseman, Sandra Cinto, Dorothy<br>Cross, Nathan Mabry, Paul Rooney, Fred Tomaselli and Tom Wood.