The story behind the image: The original analogue film exposure is from Musée d'Orsay. The museum became my favorite in Paris. The image is a take on a historical image (you have probably seen before). Made in Spring 2023, during my Paris poetry residency through The Trélex Residency. This was my second Trélex residency, as the first one I completed at the foothills of the Jura mountains in Switzerland to study psychology and pedagogical methods for healing trauma, alongside painting studies and concept development for a future exhibition on the theme of Damocles.
I had not intended to make photographs on the trip, as by now, almost every person in the world with access to the internet sees the world through images already. This means, almost everything has been photographed. Our collective imaginations are consciously and subconsciously full of precognitions of what we expect things to be like. Therefore, when a viewer enters a city or space, the potential for invention is distorted by the subtle images we already have within our collective memory.
To experience what is there directly becomes a nearly impossible task, yet one I try for. To frame something in any way that can contribute to the already impressive oeuvre of photographers in the world has become a greater if not even more impossible challenge. Moreover, the responsibility of understanding this flooding of images to the public means I had to hop over the knowing of this form of kitsch and try to imagine a meaning of time that reflects the evidence I gained from my experience of life: there are no closed circles. The construct of time as we use it to cooperate with each other is a construct serving, not evil, but rather a system that supports billions of people on the planet. The dark tinge of the stories people are telling about reality today is reflected by the fact the bodies are still illuminated by the reality just beyond the frame-within-a-frame.
Perhaps unnecessarily optimistic, the vision of darkness per my understanding of photography is that white is darkness and darkness is light: not in the actual sense of things, but more in a Jungian or beyond the veil sort of perspective- a perspective that cycles with no myths around the moon, but the beautiful pragmatism of never-ending changes of seasons and subtle shifts that is life. In this way, everyday getting to know life, even in an expected image, the shirt invites viewers to physically take on a Vision that invites individual vision and imagination. The image has no story, but we make one up…and it is that confluence of serendipity, awareness, playful cynicism and willingness to keep imaging that fueled this collaboration that was also made possible by, my dear friend and bio-field practitioner, Stephanie Joyce Larson. Her support, among many, allowed me to cross an imaginary portal of a painful shared delusion and relentless punishment back to the path I had set out on as a toddler.
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