Creating and submitting art is scary as hell.
I long to be seen but also not seen at the same time. Sometimes I wish I could walk around in the world with just my art for a face. Like a picture frame for a head, and somehow the pictures can change, but it is a screenless type of technology. I am obsessed with the analog, and I hope it is not seen as me trying to get on top of a soapbox and preach what I think others should engage in. I know that it works for me, and while it's not everyone's cup of tea, I do think that people can benefit from returning to a more tangible/analog life.
Listening to records, writing on paper, collaging, putting your phone in a box, social media detox for the weekend, week, month, or even year, reading the newspaper?! Or magazines, taking a break from streaming, finding an old TV with a VHS player or a DVD player, and going to the library and renting a DVD, or the 2nd hand store and giving your dollars to a different cause, a small business that is working to keep the physical in this world.
There is no need to live in one world fully. But if we shut one out, what are we missing when we don’t let the others in?
From 2009-2010 this troll traveled with me everywhere.
This was a particularly challenging year for my health. I had just come back from studying in France, my grandmother passed away, and I was hit by a car on my bike. To find a new normal, I decided to turn to my Nikon AE-1 and *focus* on how I could see the world through the eyes of a Scottish-themed Troll doll my sister gifted me for my birthday as an adult. Trolls were always such a mystery and an object of fascination growing up. Their colorful, fuzzy, matted mohawks, gemmed bellies, funky themed outfits, and lack of genitalia (but they all have a butt). They were everything fine and weird about the world around me as a child.
Jackie was a punk. She was that friend everyone had, wanted, and needed to get away from all at once. She smelled like suntan oil, drove a convertible, and rescued a beautiful black pitbull named Pandora. She was everything wrong about growing up in the 1980s and 1990s and everything right about being an elder millennial in the early 2000s. We smoked, cried, drank, and fought through body image envy until we couldn’t anymore.