For the past couple of years, the work I’ve made has centered around the light that visualized itself to me in a near death experience back when I was 21. It was one of the most impressionable and transformative moments of my life. This focus on light for so long has led me to remember the darkness that was as equally transformative. The darkness was the first visual that appeared when I died. This darkness was not terrifying, but comforting. It felt the way a warm blanket out of a dryer feels on a cold winter day. The darkness was delicate, tender, loving. It was unassuming, not asking to be recognized or acknowledged. It simply swaddled me in its loving emptiness. In its presence I was completely free from everything: a sense of self (an “I”), of time, of form, of thoughts and emotions. Nothing existed and yet everything existed in that moment. Without the darkness, I would not have been able to see the light. The light brought the “I” back, it spoke to the “I” and returned me back to life and all of its senses (form, thought, emotion, time). Neither is good and neither is bad. Darkness and light are two parts of the same undercurrent. One is not better than the other. They do not battle, but compliment. Light is full of life, darkness is full of emptiness. To truly love one you must love the other.

A dark take on one of the photographs from the series ‘Luminous Visions’