The inspiration came from heartbreak. A very short but profound relationship came my way a couple of years ago and left me with a strong sense of unfinished mystery. By virtue of it being brief, I vacillated between it being perverse, painful, destructive as well as expansive, full of possibilities, and a love where you have no choice but to allow all walls to crumble. It felt primal where denying it felt like denying gravity but I had to because he had to go. It took a while but I learned that I had to accept the realm that held both emotions, a realm “between two worlds.” I think of this place for us, collectively. We live in a culture that perpetuates turning a blind eye away from our fear, our grief, and destruction while in that same place is a tremendous amount of resolution, love, and truth.

Forgiveness requires vulnerability. It requires the unleashing of your own ego. It requires the ability to face the truth. It requires a small crack—like a light leak in a camera—to penetrate your walls of division leaving you no choice but to give way. This body of work requires shouldering through fear, looking wholeheartedly into the unknown, exploration, questioning doubt, confronting unexamined assumptions, facing myself, and the recognition of something larger than me and my own desires in order to offer up a possibility of meaning, and the capacity for transformation.

Sometimes I create bodies of work knowing it may suffer the weight of its own futility but, in the end, I’m required to expand my perception, to consider another story and with the intention for the viewer of my frames to consider a newer view as well. I recently read a thought by Augusten Burroughs which read, “As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many shapes and sizes. And pleasure, love, compassion, and fulfilment—these things do not leak out. So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.”

This is the power of art, to portray this and to reflect back both worlds of conflict as well as absolution. Never have we needed our artists more than now. As Arendt reminds us, “for they provide the subversive narratives that allow us to chart a new course.” Because of the stories I have covered and the humility they required as I dove deeper into each narrative, I’m continuously challenged to broaden my horizon and develop a larger sense of understanding.