B&W 35mm Silver Gelatin Prints

I’ve spent years trying to understand and “fix” myself from my anxiety. They say my anxiety is the root to everything. It is the stem behind every decision, every choice in answering “yes”, each extra hour inside my bed, each hour apart from rest. They named it ‘fatigue depression,’ which forced everything in the world to stop. A void of blankness, resistant to movement. They tried to write it off as a lack of will, but truly it was a greed for too much.

I never learned how to stop. How to stop wanting, moving, anticipating, how to sleep. It was with all of this energy stirring within me at a constant, my body began to shut down at random. Which followed was feelings of deep despair and then emptiness.

In White by Kenya Hara, he writes about the color white, and in it he states “ ‘space’ hidden in Japanese aesthetics, the state of emptiness, functions as a receptacle that can be filled with an infinite variety of meanings.” It refers to the color ‘white’ as equating to blankness. It is within the anticipation of putting meaning to or filling up this blankness that emerges these spaces of emptiness. 

These spaces are the combined result of vacancy– what hides within you. It is grief, loss, insecurity, defeat, the anticipation of greatness. It’s the wanting something more. Within these states reside the evergrowing feeling of longing. Longing for purity, cleanliness, chaos, order, autonomy, control, mania, rebellion, longing to long for the right thing.  Humans crave in contradiction. This empty space is the omission of results. 

I’ve seen people cope with empty space in many ways. I soon discovered I was able to avoid the space with drugs. I manipulated my brain and body through an equation of chemicals which’s only outcome was movement. Anxiety, exhaustion, despair, distraction became variables of my own decision. Others find other paths– religion, romance, sex, sleep, pain, social media, eccentrism, each with their own essence of destruction. I have lost many people to the space: through addiction, domestic violence, impulse. Each loss comes a new extension to my vacancy– and I too hide, like everyone else.

Within these prints are depictions of these stages and shifts, ranging from the embodiment of the space, the rising anticipation, and our attempts to forget it. These prints utilize both the physical space on the paper and the images themselves to wrestle with both confinement and liberation. It weighs both heaviness and lightness, drasticness, and simplicity, to complete or represent the human cycles or states of emptiness.