PERCEPTUAL ISOLATION
I experience sleep paralysis, a disorder that causes visceral nightmares in which you are paralyzed and unable to wake up. Even after waking, the line between dream and reality remains blurred. In my case, these nightmares replay a memory of sexual assault from my adolescence. This memory was repressed for many years and I could not consciously recall it, even as it replayed in my dreams. When these episodes intensify, I exist in a suspended state suspended between dream and reality, remembering and forgetting.
This series seeks to capture that sense of suspension and the psychological underworld of my sleep condition and traumatic experience. Through these images, I reconstruct moments from my dreams, as well as the visions that emerge in my mind's eye during the fragile space between wakefulness and sleep. My intention is to create an immersive visual world that mirrors my internal one, and to activate the viewer as a participant in the photographs with me, to engage with the fragmented nature of traumatic memory.
Press: