Filmed in my studio in Manchester, New Hampshire in March 2026, this self-portrait video emerges from a world defined by psychic overload, fragmentation, and the slow violence of contemporary life. It is not simply a document of my body in space, but an inquiry into what it means to remain emotionally legible in a time that continually numbs, distorts, and disperses the self.
The work operates in the territory between performance and confession, where the body becomes both image and site: a surface onto which fear, desire, exhaustion, alienation, and resilience are projected. In this sense, the piece engages with the long tradition of self-portraiture not as self-description, but as self-interrogation. The “self” presented here is not stable or singular. It is fractured, mediated, and haunted by the conditions of the present moment—by saturation, instability, loneliness, spectacle, and the eerie collapse between private feeling and public image.
Video is essential to that psychology. Unlike a still image, which can imply mastery or containment, the moving image allows emotion to remain unresolved. It unfolds in duration, closer to lived consciousness: repetitive, suspended, cyclical. The film lingers inside a condition rather than illustrating an event. It resists closure. In doing so, it echoes the temporal experience of existing in contemporary life, where dread can become ambient, intimacy can feel endangered, and identity itself can seem caught between performance, surveillance, and disappearance.
There is also a tension in the work between presence and removal. To place myself in the frame is to offer visibility, but not full access. The image becomes a threshold rather than an explanation. What is revealed is inseparable from what is withheld. This gesture feels deeply tied to the present cultural moment, in which exposure is constant yet genuine recognition remains rare. We are more visible than ever, and often less knowable. The film inhabits that contradiction.
Within the context of the world as it now feels—destabilized, grief-saturated, technologically mediated, politically feverish, and spiritually exhausted—this piece becomes an act of resistance as much as expression. It insists on interiority in a time of flattening. It insists on atmosphere, ambiguity, and feeling in a culture that so often demands speed, clarity, and endless consumption. Rather than offering escape, it creates a space to sit inside unease, to aestheticize psychic tension without diminishing its truth.
As a self-portrait, this work is less about representing who I am than about materializing a state of being. It is an embodiment of inner weather: cinematic, intimate, and unsettled. A moving image of what it feels like to exist inside a body, inside a mind, inside a world that is increasingly difficult to hold.
