“It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so deeply.” SP
The Santa Anas blowing hot and dry, the aquamarine glow of the swimming pool out back, the Beach Boys’ crystalline harmonies coming through the speakers, a pink velour bathing suit stretched over my round toddler belly, and the not-knowing. Sometimes I go here.
Looking for bugs that weren’t there, the gaping wounds you dug into your arms, the bile brimming in my throat as I murmured, “It’s okay,” over and over again. Sometimes I go here.
Sometimes my mind goes elsewhere, to other times and spaces, to other stories that are not my own but feel innately familiar all the same: to Brian Wilson, to Kurt Cobain, to cave dwelling glow worms, to the French Revolution, to hazy fairy tales filled with true love and betrayal and monsters and melancholy. Sometimes I go here.
Describing what this work is about is an act almost as difficult as making the work itself, because it is an amalgamation of all of these places and all of these stories. It is the conscious’ attempt to understand the subconscious. It is the result of asking myself, “why,” again and again and again. This work is about the dichotomy between who we feel we should be and who we actually we are. It is about heartbreak and longing. It is about exorcising trauma by acknowledging its existence and beginning to understand its impact. It is about unpacking oneself as a being, inch by inch.
With this work, I am attempting to show you the world that I go to, a space somewhere between the past and the present, between the real and the imagined. Through performance and installation, I seek to set a temporary stage, to craft a sensory experience that melds the personal with the universal, the intimate with the spectacular. My hope for this work is to perhaps reveal something about myself—how I perceive the world, and what has shaped that perception—in a more honest and resonant way than words would ever allow. Perhaps in doing so, I might even reveal something to you about yourself as well.