Eternity is a Myth

Our concept of time is centered around the Earth's relatioinship with the sun. There is the exact measurement of time in increments of minutes, hours, days, and years. Then there is our relative perception of time where an hour can feel like an eternity or a year can go by really fast. In documenting every minute of a sunrise and sunset through photography and arranging the photographs in a linear rise and fall in my work, Solar Return, I time myself and let myself feel time in a purely ritualistic way. I squint at the sun shining through the apparatus of a digital camera at a singular camera setting, letting the exposures gradually get so bright or so dark that information gets blotted out. Extraneous details such as airplane exhaust trails, tree branches, and telephone poles act as anchors for the minutiae of the passing minutes in the sun's fluctuating position in the sky.

The dichotomy of light and dark continues to play in my diptych, L'Appel du Vide, taken on black and white 4x5 film and made into 20"x24" silver gelatin prints. These tunnels hold personal significance as they are the sites of my near-death experience with a train and a chaotic event where the police broke up a punk show. The tunnels both feature extensive graffiti around their edges, referencing the New Topographics movement in urban textures and how human intervention has radically shifted the natural landscape. Metaphorically tunnels represent passage through internal darkness, with the light at the end symbolic for hope or death. 

Personal Priestess is a sculpture and performance about my sexual relationship trauma, where I "confess" my sins to a priest costume by calling a burner phone positioned as its head. By expressing this heavy baggage in the public eye, I place myself in a vulnerable position through radical self-disclosure. The feedback of the close-proximity call paired with the overshare of personal information in a narrative format cuts through the air to trigger discomfort, encourage commiseration, and absolve myself of shame and victimization.

Last but not least, Deathbed for the Universe is a monumental drawing of a hospital bed spray painted on plastic suspended on a wall and taped to the floor at an angle to create a drop shadow. I was inspired by the theory of the Big Crunch, the eventual heat death of the universe, and my experiences with death and loss from working briefly as a certified nurse assistant. The distressed texture of the spray enamel paint peeling from the plastic adds to the concept of decay, and compliments the urban decay of the tunnel photographs. The end of our time on Earth is a sobering reality that we universally face. When even the most timeless thing to ever exist, the universe, will eventually die, eternity becomes a myth.