My mind often wanders into a world that is separate from the reality my body inhabits. Thoughts piling on top of one another leave me with no rest and this disassociation muddles how I navigate my reality. I can't help but feel as though all I can do is meet this skewed perception at a halfway point of embrace, rather than fight it.
Throughout my everyday, this world I observe is fragmented by this way of seeing as if it was through the viewfinder on my camera. My world is reflected and refracted through what seems to be a series of convex glasses, further being distorted and altered via a focal ring.
As a means of finding clarity in between these two separated places, I use the camera to aid in visualizing this sense of feeling unarmed and receptive and open to the world. This halfway point of embrace turns to documenting and capturing moments and glimpses of this surreal, dream-like world in which I am simply an observer. My work is visually informed by how I see with intense focus on specific things and with using soft focus and shallow depth of fields I am able to recreate how I see.
In the Middle of Uncertainty with My Arms Opened Wide is a window into my distorted world through my eye, by my hand, that I aim to represent what living with this dissociative state is like.
I am actively looking and trying to understand myself, in a world that I feel so far disjointed from. This ongoing project immediately addresses myself, and where I stand in the world amidst this intersection.
In this search, I look for visual symbols and patterns that repeat themselves, naturally, as a means of affirming that there is some order in a world of chaos. These signs are often subtle, hidden, and require slow observing and contemplation while looking to uncover them, especially through constant waves of uncertainty. Walking and wandering has been a large part of my process; looking for lush color in this dream-like state and how light plays with the environment, finding how the sunlight naturally is casted through a privacy film, how a wisp of gnats dance in the sun as it sets through the trees.
I look for these flashes of light amidst the dark and know that these symbols are like waypoints on a map for me to reference at a later time. When looking back at these waypoints I am able to continue constructing a roadmap through documenting times where I am not present.