As a child I had ample time to explore and get lost in my head, and I utilized all of it. Our yard was my forest and a tree, my home. The squirrels were not pests, but companions, and the streets were not streets, but rivers.
Death is an old and familiar friend that I do not care to keep. I continued to use this lofty imagination to live past what pained me. Loss, death, and suicide respawned, and every empty person and biting thought and place soon gave birth to another, a different, person, thought, and place.
January 9th, 2009 was a day that could have stolen a family's sanity. I was almost out the door when my mother stopped me, telling me not to leave but to wait for her to get off of the phone, and closed her bedroom door. She had received a call from the police, informing her of a homocide-suicide that had taken place a couple hours earlier at the same address I was heading to, my aunt and uncle's, to photograph my aunt, make sundaes, and watch movies. Several years before this, my younger sister had passed away to cancer. My aunt's face was the only face I remembered seeing at my sister's funeral, and she had smiled through her tears.
After this, I unknowingly fell into a cold and barren land of guilt and anger. I shut myself off in order to protect and rebuild what was left of the walls I had previously constructed around myself. To be honest, I think we all did. A couple years passed, and I slowly began to emerge from this state and mentally and meticulously rebuild myself.
My entry for this competition turned out to be immensely more personal than I had originally intended it to be. The photographs and story seemed to warp themselves as I went along and contort into what they were supposed to be, the truest and most intimate thing I know. I was hesitant to write an artist statement because I wanted the photographs to stand alone and be open to interpretation, but now I feel this has only served me better in creating these images as it spurred an all too real and honest analysis of my motivation and subconscious reasoning behind it.
I desire to show the beauty that exists despite man's taintedness and wrongdoings. I long to share the world one can create even in the face of death and loss. I wish to reveal the real existence of healing through hurt and finding life through death. Wounds are not permanent. Scars fade, and bone regenerates. There is light to be found through darkness if we so choose to see it. There is growth to be nurtured within ruin if we so choose to find it. There is a beginning to every end, and a birth to every death, if we so choose it.
