"In truth, all sensation is already memory" - Henri Bergson

"Sometimes I disassociate. I feel as if I am watching my life unfold through a television
screen, or through someone else's eyes, an outsider's view. This detachment has shown me the
world as a first and third person entity. Because of it, I am in awe of humanity in its purest form. I am fascinated by the brain circuitry connections that bind our senses to our emotional selves, and that also bind us as a societal whole.

How much do we share a common sense of the world? Is there some type of energetic eroticism that links us all together? What makes a memory "real"? Is reality merely just a manifestation of our perception? How does one's environment and culture shape how we perceive the world? In my practice I explore how memory, experience, and culture shape our individual and collective consciousness. I tackle these questions through the use of figures, aspects of translucency, multiplicity, collage and explorations of fact vs fiction. My practice helps me challenge our learned framework of the world, our perceptual contingency, and aims to break down understood perceptions. I want to be a communicator of existence and the human condition, with all of the banal, erotic and ludicrous moments that are contained within it.

Anthropology and neurology have helped me engage in some of these questions and
perspectives. 'In working memory, all of the systems of representation in the brain – sensation, motor and feeling – are integrated to form a living picture of oneself and the world in this present conscious moment' (O'Keene 174). Everything we have lived, everything we have smelled and tasted and touched, contributes to how we view ourselves, the world around us and how we associate with any given situation. Memory is the basis for all we know and for all we feel; it is the learned framework of the world.

By studying the human brain and the nature of memory, I am trying to understand how
each part of our cerebrum constitutes to how we perceive the world. How and where our senses get absorbed into our psyche, how it is digested and excreted to create our own reality. Information is constantly entering our brains, but most of it simply fades because it has no relevance; it depends on the strength of the signal of the neuron to dictate whether or not the dendritic proteins will be released to create a more permanent memory. If the signal is poor, the cell assembly firing will fade away. So, for example, in a crowd of 30 people, 10 people noticed the man that slipped because it scared them, while 10 others don't recall it happening because it didn't trigger anything in their autonomic nervous system. No two people remember an event the exact same. Proportionally, over time as our memories recede from the certainty of the present, they become blurred and screwed. Because of this, memories are never constant from person to person, or within ourselves.

Our lives are a continuous dictionary that uses our senses, and turns them into memories to teach us about familiarity and thus, reality. In the same way, I contemplate about how psychotic disorders – which often cause different ways of using our senses – can disrupt this shared reality. In Veronica O'Kneane's book A Sense of Self: Memory, the Brain, and Who We Are, she, a professor of psychiatry, writes about patients who have suffered psychosis as an effort to clarify how memories, true and false, are formed. She puts subjective experiences into perspective. 'Commonly, those experiencing auditory hallucinations will look as if they are talking to themselves, whereas in their reality, they are responding to voices that are as audible and real to them as the voice of a living person...The memory was real' (O'Keane 5-9). Whether psychotic or not, our senses, our individual perspectives, are never static, and accordingly get muddled in the messy web of neural connections that form memories. A memory is an interpretation of the outside world, how one associates with a situation. Reality therefore is in a constant state of flux.

My dissociative experiences have made me second guess how others see the world, when I myself have experienced more than one mode of perceiving. Having been removed from myself, I have been in moments stripped from my biases, or my insecurities whispering in my ears, and it allowed me to see the world for what it is. During these episodes, people seem like bodies in a space – far removed, an overwhelming collective of beings. But, when I am in my normal, sensate state, I feel people's energies, their souls. The brain is a center for the material body, but is separate from the immaterial soul. This dualism between mind versus brain, and individual versus collective, and the fine line that separates them is my source of inspiration, and is where I find endless exploration. In my practice, I try to recreate how I remember my own fluctuating realities in an effort to have my viewers question theirs."

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