PERCEPTUAL ISOLATION
For much of my life, I have experienced sleep paralysis — a disorder that causes visceral nightmares. In my case, these nightmares replayed a buried memory of sexual assault from my adolescence, an event I could not consciously recall for years but which surfaced repeatedly in my dreams. Sleep paralysis traps you within the nightmare, making it nearly impossible to wake up. Even after waking, the line between dream and reality remains blurred. When these episodes intensify, I exist in a liminal state suspended between dream and reality, remembering and forgetting.
This photographic series, called "Perceptual Isolation," 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.
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