PERCEPTUAL ISOLATION (2020-2022)

I experience a sleep disorder called sleep paralysis, which causes nightmares that are very visceral and physically intense. They used to happen once a month or so, but in early 2020 they were happening multiple times a night. During these nightmares, you can't physically wake up and you are trapped in a world between dream and reality. It's state of forced immobility in your own mind.

Because they were happening so often, I realized that these nightmares were replaying a traumatic memory from my adolescence. This memory had been repressed for a long time, but I continued to dream about it. I had just moved into a very old, dark apartment in Los Angeles. Between my sleep paralysis and chronic insomnia, I was spending a lot of time awake in the middle of the night. I was living in a state of suspension between waking and sleeping, forgetting and remembering, and dream and reality.

To try and understand my experience, I began reading about trauma and the mind. I learned that my experience is not uncommon: traumatic experience often imprints on parts of the brain that are not easily accessible to cognition but can be active during sleep. There have been studies of people who don’t remember what happened to them but dream about it for decades.

In these photographs, I want to visualize the sense of suspension that I was living in, and use this as a visual metaphor for consciousness and the processing of trauma, as I experienced it. These nightmares made my life feel like a perpetual underworld. My intention with this series 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. I present a limited scope of vision with the frame to mirror how we remember things in a limited way, and how limited peripheral vision gets during times of stress. Your gaze, your imagination, becomes my material for exploring the mysterious depths of the mind and fragmentary processing of traumatic experience.