BREATH HELD

Breath Held in and installation with a very simple mission; to draw its viewer into a feeling state of anxiety. It is offered as an account of my own chemical struggles with anxiety and depression, and the tension it evokes is a way to explain what it is to live with the weight of unnamed calamity hanging, like the Sword of Damocles, over events of one’s daily life. The act of causing this feeling in my viewers is less an act of malice and more an invitation, for those who do not, or have not experienced this kind of emotional feeling state, to understand those of us who do.

Additionally, as a part of the larger body of work within Apologies, it is a kind of auto-biographical account of my own navigating between two traditionally opposing gender modes. The hammer, which is hard, blunt and possibly destructive , can be viewed as a stand-in for many masculine stereotypes. The glass, which sit atop the metal frame of the desk, is sharp, transparent and fragile — things which might represent the feminine opposite. Here again the tension I am to create is less aggressive proclamation about these two things, but rather an expression of my own internal dialog as I oscillate, as most humans do, between the acting as the hammer and acting as the glass.