Artist Statement

So, i've rewritten my artist statement and I thought about writing it as if it were a page in a journal... BUT I want feedback on it to see if its a good idea or not lol

April 25, 2014

Isolated, quiet, weird… Growing up, I felt this way and the people around me, including my surroundings, reminded me of it all the time, but it wasn’t until I moved to Suffolk, Virginia that I really realized I was this way and why. My parents divorced before I could establish memories from real events and my mother was in the military so we (my mom, older sister, and I) moved to new locations every 3 years. It always took me long to get comfortable at my new addresses, but even when I did I was never fully to the point where expression was easy, so I, a lot of the time, stayed to myself and even when I was in company I somehow still always felt alone.

I moved to Suffolk in 2005 and everything about it was unusual to me. The atmosphere wasn’t close to being similar to the cities I lived before. I was living in the country, or what I used to call it, “The Middle of No Where”. Land and woods surrounded my house. I could walk down the street and stop to see a deer standing next to me. As I would ride through the 2 lane, one-way traffic highway to get to any destination, out my window I would see cotton fields – it was my first time ever witnessing one - vast amounts of empty space, or maybe just one tree standing in the middle of it. Moving to this city, at the beginning, was the worse thing I could possibly think of. To live in a place like this just could not be fathomed. As the time passed and I began to get comfortable, I spent a lot of time unaccompanied and I began to appreciate that I was able to do that. I could sit outside and be completely alone with the sound of ambient noise as if it were silence. I could do it at nighttime without having a worry and see the stars in the sky. I did this frequently, and it made me realize that this city actually reminded me of someone I knew, and coincidentally, that person was me. I wanted to explore Suffolk and I did. I wanted to learn why this city that I hated so much became therapeutic to me. I traveled around Suffolk with my camera with me and the things that stuck out to me, the things that I somehow felt a connection and was compelled to, I would snap a photograph of it. Suffolk, the peanut capital, this solitary place, and the first placed I didn’t have to move away from became my home and became a story I wanted to tell through photographs. But this is just a chapter in my isolated, quiet, and weird journey.