General Entry - Emerging Talent Awards

When you lose a parent it is a life altering event, life is never quite the same again. On the one year anniversary of my Mother's death I found myself still struggling with the loss of the most important person in my life. I have always been a spiritual person but my beliefs were not only being questioned, they were shattered. I wanted to believe that we are surrounded by our loved ones, but at the same time I asked myself is death final nothing more? Several months after my mother passed away my sister and I went to see world renown medium Allison Dubois. The experience was cathartic. One thing that stuck with me was something that Allison said about the deceased reverting back to the image or time in their lives that they were most happy and that they have the ability to be omnipresent. I started this portfolio by merging vintage family photographs with my 35mm film work. What evolved was a marriage between the past and the present it was not only a way of dealing with loss, memory, history, and time, but also a discovery of my past that was never known. I made up stories, I tried to imagine my loved ones walking around the landscape in this alternate dimension existing in their own private haven. I tried to imagine how they would inform my present reality and to find a way for the past and the present to exist simultaneously in my work. " Arrow of Time" is a theory which explains that time moves only in one direction and cannot exist without entropy. Though we cannot time travel to the past I believe that in some way we all carry the past into our present as well as the future. Looking at where we came from gives meaning and purpose in our lives. As I look at these images I realize that I am no closer to the answers I seek, but I come away with the knowledge that life is a process-there is an order to nature, life, and death- and how we navigate our way in the world comes from a respect for the past.