I did have the opportunity over summer to shoot some stills which made me feel really nostalgic if i could call it that. I have really missed the camera a great deal, while preparing for this semester I have to remind myself that even though this place seems/feels/is foreign the stories that i want to tell are universal even though the displacement is challenging.
these are a continuation of the work that has been shown here through the past two months.
I come from the West, East, North and South, a combination of light and dark, the triangle finds itself complicated in my blood. Hundreds of years ago my ancestors docked against shores labeled “Paradise”, where the sun always shone a bright gold and burnt my skin red. My mother would insist that I stand still while she untangled the wind and salt from my mane. She silently prayed to the new moon for thick hair four times a year. My sister and I always had the blankest of stares when we were ordered to stand in front of her while she chopped away our girlish tendrils only to reveal horror.
Looking back recalling the intense silence and concentration on her face, her thick fingers that held steadily to the sharp scissors, I often wonder what was racing across her mind on those sad Sunday Evenings. I flinched whenever she reached the corner of my ear dreading that one slip would bring blood. The scent of the sea changing my composition daily and the evening turning a piercing warm before the sun dropped from the horizon, like a heavy globular God, always reminded me of one thing.
The Missing. The missing had gone to sea; he had gone to leave his trace. Markings that would determine my future, precise incisions made with foresight. The reverberation in my young mind felt like abandon. It felt like we were all strangers. Especially when he came back to throw me in the air, catch and release me, letting us stand on his back while he exuded magical powers underwater naming everything in the ocean for me; fauna, rays and reefs, his lungs expanding and morphing into something beyond human.
Amphibious. The traces that were left in all the confined spaces of the sea, I carry now with me, unconsciously I move towards the tide in this concrete jungle. Forever bound by the blood that flows in my veins and the words that spill vibrantly full of exaggeration from lips. Memory becomes an unstable concept enabling us to reveal and make experiences more important than they really are. Now all of our lives flow together in fiction, theirs loudly and visible mine entangled, woven and silent.
Repair, I am making repair. I am attempting immortalization, the preservation of unreliable moments. I am wondering and wandering, proving and disproving, silently trusting my intuition, that internal compass that directs me, like that incision made so long ago. I am in the midst of endeavoring and perpetuating selfish behavior, to preserve all attempts to free myself from thoughts of expiration.
I am a Vincentian visual artist and writer, based in New York City, and a recent graduate of Bard College | International Center of Photography where I earned my M.F.A in Advanced Photographic Studies. My work has been shown regionally and internationally, the latest as a part of the New York Camera Club Conversation Series and the International Center of Photography Show "The Exquisite Landscape". I look forward to share my words, images and thoughts and of course if anything touches or provokes you please drop a few lines