PERCEPTUAL ISOLATION (2020 - 2022)
For most of my life I have experienced sleep paralysis, a disorder that causes visceral nightmares during which you are physically paralyzed and unable to wake up. When these dreams happen I become trapped, simultaneously awake and asleep, unable to physically move or fully wake from the dream. Even after I wake up, the line between dream and reality remains blurry. In my case, these nightmares replay a traumatic memory of sexual assault from my adolescence. For many years I could not consciously remember this event, but it surfaced repeatedly in my dreams.
When my sleep paralysis happens more frequently, I exist suspended between dream and reality, remembering and forgetting. As I processed these recurring nightmares and the trauma they replay, I began making photographs to visually capture the psychological underworld in which I find myself.
In this work, I photograph myself as I recreate nightmares, memories, and visions that appear in my minds’ eye in the hazy space between sleeping and wakefulness. As both director and performer, I consider the role of the viewer of these photographs – how can I activate a viewer to become a participant in the images with me? My intention is to create an immersive visual world that mirrors my internal one and to explore our capacity for transformation in the midst of traumatic experience.
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