Artist Statement
I got a call from my brother last Thursday. The Baba Yaga was outside his window, staring at him from the yard; it's been over a decade since he saw her last. It’s August now, and his first child, Aiden, was born a few weeks ago. As a protective ritual, he’s been sprinkling salt on every windowsill and placing selenite crystals atop every doorframe. Since having Aiden, he’s become much more fearful and vigilant in response to the occult activity that seems to haunt his life. I’m not sure what to make of the Baba Yaga, or of the demon that tried to possess him three years ago, but I believe in his stories and his perception of reality.

Through examining anecdotal experiences with the occult, alongside a practice of studying, chasing, and attempting to conjure phenomena and myth, I distort and play with the line in which belief waivers and bleeds between truth and fiction. Myth is a participant in building our worldview, inherited both familially and culturally, defining what initially sits within and outside of our framework of reality. It is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is often invisible. Considering the fluidity, intersection, and instability of memory, myth, and photography, and leaning into elements of the gothic, in both content and form, I explore the ambiguities of certainty and mystery, and the subversion of Western cultural norms.

A photograph is fundamentally dishonest, despite its uncanny resemblance to reality. Utilizing duality and doubling as a formal, compositional, and gothic trope, as well as a conceptual cornerstone of the work, I deconstruct and destabilize dualisms, including what is forgotten/forgone, past/present, absurd/sensible, certain/uncertain, and reality/myth. I reject the authority to discern the truthfulness or certainty of an experience as strictly objective or subjective, and suggest that it lacks a sort of fundamental empathy. I believe experience is much more nuanced, and that there should be space for experiential truth to live alongside what may be provable as objective. Dualisms often create a dangerous binary and oppositional logic, and in this context, rupture a way of experiencing and understanding life that is so tethered and intrinsic to the human experience.

Throughout my ongoing search and attempted conjurings, I have begun to question whether or not the active presence of the supernatural truly matters. For it to be “real” or not makes no difference in my eyes; rather, my attention has shifted more onto its association with the othering of those who claim to have experiences. I use the camera as a tool both to document and fabricate reality, challenging how a viewer’s orientation may affect how they extend gestures of trust, reverence, and empathy. Oscillating between levels of certainty and dissonance, The Sun Danced That Day reflects upon the way in which text and image ask for and negotiate with faith, belief, and perception.