about the object permanence series

About my paintings: I use art as a way to cope and process the reality of being alive. Self portraiture specifically is a way of cathartically meditate on my emotions as well as an important means of reflecting on experiences. I often use abstraction as a mechanism for confronting the difficulties of my life and body, manifesting discomfort through the language of brushstrokes.

My art is created through the lens of being a trans & intersex person with ADHD. Those facets of myself deeply impact my life and unignorably my art. I make art for myself; to remember and to heal, but I also make it for others; to be a mirror for voices like mine that haven’t been heard yet.

A polaroid is the closest a photograph can be to a painting. The irony of this project is that each integral film polaroid ever taken is unique and impossible to truly reproduce since the first SX-70 model entered the public’s hands in 1972. “Integral film” is the fancy term for the proprietary white bordered, square(ish), instant photo we imagine when we hear the word “polaroid”. Each integral film polaroid contains a pod of chemicals underneath the larger border on the bottom that spreads developer, dyes, and acid layered together in a secret sauce beneath the plastic when the photo is squeezed through the rollers at the mouth of the camera. This process bakes the image into the scientific baklava allowing the chemicals to work their magic, resulting in every single photo being not just an image, but a unique tangible object. So sure, today you could scan a polaroid using a Epson Perfection V500 flatbed scanner at 1200dpi, open it in Adobe Photoshop CC, edit it to be as close as visibly possible on a 2 dimensional plane on a high definition IPS display, then have it sent to be printed by inkjet printers en masse to exact scale and color...But just like if you were to do this to a painting, it would not fully reproduce it.

However, where the important distinction lies between a painting and an integral film polaroid photo is what they capture. The development process of a polaroid is not completely instantaneous, but the image exposed is. Though instantaneous a polaroid never actually captures the present, only the immediate past; the moment when the shutter was pressed. So when the camera spits out the photo, it is actually a physical, unchangeable memory, emerging like magic from the mouth of a box of glass, metal, and plastic. Where as I think of a painting more as a collection of decisions compiled from memories. Even if I were to paint something directly from observation, there are still gaps in time where I am not looking at what is in front of me and I am using my short term memory combined with my built up knowledge of paint to recreate it from my mind’s eye on the canvas. It can never capture something instantly or definitively.

Sometimes what a polaroid has recorded is at odds with how I remember the moment I took it. I notoriously have a terrible memory, and have to be constantly reminded of important events involving my flesh body that I have no recollection of. A diving catch to win a baseball game, funerals of family members and birthday parties I attended, the names of basically anyone I meet for the first 9 times. It is not for a lack of emotional investment, I am an overwhelmingly sentimental person. My sentimentality only seems to manifest with objects, as my filing cabinets would confess. I collect stuff as an overcompensation for my lack of ability to remember moments of significance, keeping them as trigger objects so that I can keep at least a slice of my past retained.

In the summer of 2021 I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder after an entire lifetime of struggling with symptoms. There is a phenomenon amongst people with ADHD where we can lack what is colloquially referred to as “object permanence”. Object permanence is clinically considered part of the fundamental development in young children that refers to gaining the ability to recognize that items and people still exist even when they can’t be seen or heard. Adults with ADHD don’t literally think objects or people disappear when they are out of sight, but it refers to the inability or struggle to remember that they are there. It is the idea of “out of sight, out of mind” in the truest sense. For instance, if I use a pair of scissors and put it in a drawer when I’m finished, I may forget that there is a pair of scissors in the house entirely when I end up needing them again because I can’t see them and don’t remember that I put them in a drawer. I have found that this extends to digital photos as well. I have over 10,000 saved images cataloged in cloud storage taken on my phone over the last 5 years, but because they are tucked away in a folder within a virtual drive accessible only by a website I forget not only that the photos themselves exist, but all the memories meant to be saved by them.

Through the process of marrying both painting and a tangible instant photo, I want to capture what it feels like to lose memories to time; parts of a mental image fading away or obscured and difficult to parse, unimportant details truly disappeared. Many of the painted layers of the pieces from this series were done weeks or months after the photo was taken. I hide them from myself to let my internal memory naturally loosen and forget details of the scene. Then, when met with those details upon reviewing the photos I will degrade them.