Exquisite Proof/Sorrow Without Name
2018-ongoing

Exquisite Proof and Sorrow Without Name encompasses two separate but interrelated bodies of work. Exquisite Proof is a series of photographic works addressing themes of mental health, familial relationships, loss, and absence and exquisite moments found/fabricated in response. My husband was first gradually and then irreplaceabley removed from our family through the use of prescribed anti-anxiety medications. Gradually his personality, his demeanor, and his ambition were taken away from him and replaced with an apathetic, disengaged, dramatically changed individual. This occurred over the course of years being prescribed medications in an attempt to manage his anxiety. This slow-moving traumatic event, one which impacted the lives of our family dramatically, became something altogether different when he was abruptly taken from our family when he discontinued his use of these medications. This resulted in brain and nerve damage, disabling him for years. During this time, I created images that documented this event quite literally through photographs that depicted his absence in our family’s lives due to his disability. Simultaneously I was creating photographs that abstracted these events, in an effort to articulate my own pain and sorrow at what was occurring in a less literal, more ephemeral manner. Exquisite Proof is a dialogue between the act of documentation and an abstraction of these experiences. They push and pull against one another, through providing information and withholding it simultaneously. They speak of trauma and beauty within the same framework.

In the spring of 2018 my father died tragically and suddenly. I am unmoored by this event. Sorrow Without Name continues the dialogue between the act of documentation and an abstraction of these experiences, both through photographic processes and the intimacy of the private journal. I’m sorry for your loss, selections from my journal, address and critique the culture of platitudes that spring up with topics such as grief are raised within contemporary culture. Sorrow Without Name is about being lost, floating beyond the edges of what I previously knew. Exquisite Proof/Sorrow Without Name bleed into one another, blurring the boundaries between current and past events.