Beautiful Disaster
a series of six photo-manipulated digital photographs and scanned textures

(March 2008)

        I was once told that ninety percent of why we do what we do comes from our subconscious. This is especially true in my case. I suppose my artistic practice beats in tandem with what can be deemed as my obsessive-compulsive need to document my life’s tragedies in several online journals. Like the numerous written confessions I have put out for those who are interested enough to read them, the visuals I create explore melodrama in relation to my subconscious – with a significantly darker twist. I play with the tensions that exist between the seen and the unseen, the public and the private. Unbeknownst to even myself until only recently, my work caters to the relentlessly inquisitive voyeur in all of us. I reveal just enough to keep my audience satiated but forever curious, though the end result is always intrinsically private.

        The Beautiful Disaster series is my extended take on Kubler-Ross’ model on the five stages of grief. It is the result of a personal, in-depth exploration of an intensely painful heartache from a first love gone horribly wrong. Admittedly, this has been my only relationship to date, even if it has lasted four long years. Though two years has passed since the separation, he continually reappears to haunt me, weaving the strands of his past relationship with me with the new relationships he insists on prematurely forging. I, on the other hand, continue to let him in against my better judgment. Each reunion and each separation is cyclic, never-ending. Consequently, my work for the past two years shows evidence of the cycle I repeatedly fall into.

        I stood before five of my professors in an attempt to present my undergraduate thesis work (which included this very series) in a more academic fashion, yet I have had aspects of my self revealed to me in ways I never thought was possible in that half hour critique alone. My professors asked me why I continue to disguise my pain with layers of ambiguity, haunting and lush though my images are. In spite of my usual guarded self, tears came streaming down my face as I realized that my tendency to work in innumerable layers parallels my inability to fully come to terms with the break-up. The past two years have rendered me an expert in the art of disguise; it is my desperate attempt to save face – proof that I can compose myself and resume life unaffected even after every painful relapse.

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