Growing up I spent the majority of my free time in the pool. My identity seemed fully realized when I became submerged in water as I reveled in the sensory hug of isotropic pressure and quiet solitude. I loved to look out from underneath the water’s surface and view the world through the abstract lens of water in motion. These portraits capture this event in reverse. I recall pondering that what I viewed through the water was a truer vision of “reality,” reality as temporary and abstract. Life is not to be lived as a rubric but rather a large abstract watercolor painting where each stage bleeds into another. Humans are not the posed reflections we see in our bathroom mirrors, an image we visualize and create as our perceived exterior representations to the world at large. Our corporal bodies are masses primarily comprised of water in a variable state of energy emission--a constant state of change. We are not static entities represented by our individual manipulated personas, facades perpetually influenced by society. My series Under the Surface aims to capture a more accurate vision of self, one that is fluid, suspended, reflective, fractured and blurred, easily subject to forces of nature and yet buoyant vessels adrift on a voyage of self-actualization.
