The past is just a nightmare I am trying to wake up from

The only artwork my family owned when I was growing up was a Thomas Kinkade wall calendar that remained permanently open to November 1996. The image, The End of a Perfect Day II, depicts a cabin near a river with an eager dog in the foreground awaiting the arrival of a paddling of ducks. Despite the calm facade, I always had the distinct feeling that this image, capturing a moment just before dark, captures the moment just before a life-altering entity enters the frame. My father was a police officer who primarily communicated through a series of grunts, eye rolls, and coded gestures. On rare occasions, when something he witnessed at work was too momentous to bury, he recounted scenes of devastation and loss at the dinner table. He would fixate on the setting and the arrangement of objects: the uncanny shape of a car's front end after impact or intricate burn patterns on wood and metal. The cause always remained undescribed or unnamed. And nothing breeds anxiety like the unknown.

The past is just a nightmare I am trying to wake up from, the ongoing series of photographs I am submitting with this application, trying to confront the power of the unknown. These images are rooted in personal narratives, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction, between memory and projection. Drawn to the contradictions that exist in the nuances of the everyday: beauty and dread, control and unraveling, presence and absence, my practice revolves around searching for meaning and for emotional clarity, for the moment something ordinary becomes cinematic, poetic, or quietly unexplainable.