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 his stories, and in his perception of reality.

Through examining anecdotal experiences with the occult, alongside a practice of studying, chasing, and attempting to conjure shared phenomena and myth, The Sun Danced That Day distorts and plays with the line in which belief waivers and bleeds between truth and fiction. Photographs confirm our existence, validating what we deem as real, but they are merely a reflection of our individual perception, and similar to memory, a faulted fragment of what “truly” was. Using the camera as a questioning device, and as a tool to both document and fabricate reality, I challenge the notions of what is and isn’t, and whether or not supernatural forces are present.

However, the process of making this work follows the desire for both myself and the viewer to open themselves up to considering the reality of what may seem inexplicable. I question the authority to define experience through binary thinking, and believe there to be more nuance than discerning it as either strictly objective or subjective. I’m focused on the process of image-making in connection to deep empathy, and by reflecting upon, listening to, and relating to phenomena, folklore, and myths, I explore their tethers to perception. I create images that speak to that empathic gesture and attempt to hold onto the encounter’s latent essence and embodied experience.

Similar to my approach to making, I see this work as an invitation to consider and sit with others’ beliefs, not necessarily to adopt them, but to show reverence and empathy. Photography is inseparable from the maker’s cognition; every image carries the conditions of their perception. To look at a photograph is to momentarily occupy another’s framework of reality, and engagement, then, is not passive viewing but an empathic gesture and negotiation between belief, doubt, projection, and trust.