We are made of many suns
2022-Present (work in progress)
Recipient of the project support grant through Center for Photographic Art (2023)
We Are Made of Many Suns is a project comprised of abstract, representational, and figurative images relating to the concept of emptiness. The inspiration for this project sprang forth from the Mahayana Buddhist concept, Sunyata. This concept effectively states that the truest form of existence is emptiness. This calls attention to the way that blackness arises and becomes, how it is birth and death, and a sequence of life, suffering, and healing. Sunyata, represents complete spiritual and psychological freedom. I consider this project as an experience of emptiness that is vast and meditative. It is an invitation to my audience to contemplate the intensity of emptiness through acts of minimalism, texture, form, light, shadow; essentially using formal qualities of art to speak towards complex belief systems.
I understand that working with such an indexical medium poses a paradoxical question about how to replicate or visually express emptiness. As with most of my work, I do not seek the answers to life’s biggest questions. These images are intended to activate the imagination to ponder such paradoxes and lead the viewer into their own mental domain. These images are a spiritual exercise to challenge Western and colonized concepts about the world and our place in it. Each image acts as its own star, retaining its own solar system, and effectively its own cosmology.
