Rainbows
In this project, I am searching for moments of rupture. These rainbows are pierces and punctums in the fabric of perceived reality. They allude to larger questions of photography's ability to document and record and to the psychology of memory and human perception.
Just as grief and traumatic memory are on going and evolving processes of the mind, this photographic series is on going and evolving over the course of many years.
Rainbows are mistakes. Hallucinatory marks on skies and walls, rainbows are moments where fractured light has failed to integrate into a coherent whole. As delusions of grandeur and fissures in the fabric of our realities, these chimeras are moments of beauty in broken arcs of brightness.
Memory is just as hallucinatory. Some people remember trips to Disney World or favorite birthday parties filled with balloons that teetered, half-inflated, just below the ceiling. Instead I remember the warmth of the light as it slanted through the window and fell in a half-crescent on the blue and white flowered quilt. I remember clutching you tight against me and feeling the thump of your heart as we watched the light dance across the walls.
Now amnesia renders blankness and I search for connections in an attempt to fill that fissure. I trace lines between unrelated moments, suturing together what doesn't want to fit in a desperate attempt at wholeness. Memory and recording, after all, aren’t always the same. The beautiful splintered light that constantly recurs dissolves distance and time. It connects us again across the vastness of space and fills the echoing silence that still exists between us.
I keep searching for you in rainbows. They might be aberrations, but they are also you and me and we, moments where the light is pierced and wounded just enough to let me back into our life, if only for a moment.
