I am consistently amazed by the norms set for how a brain is supposed to function; society allows the possibility that different brains function differently, but judges all deviation as wrong and therefore ill. We do this as a way of distinguishing the correct way of being from the incorrect. I understand that we construct these ideals so that we may make sense out of reality's bewildering variation, unpredictability, and seemingly meaningless gestures. We seek comfort. In order to be comforted, we make clear-cut distinctions between what is logical and illogical, normal and abnormal. In actuality, these distinctions are fragile, threatened by our dreams, hazy memories, and sleep-deprived visions - threatened unconsciously by ourselves. As a child of a mother who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, I am perhaps more invested in these issues than others.

          I am compelled by how people idealize concepts such as wholeness and perfection when the possibility of their attainment is merely conjecture. I find the ways in which we impose order on an inherently disordered world to be simultaneously absurd, melancholic, and hopeful; absurd, because no matter what we do, the world will never be ordered, and thus our attempts end in failure; melancholic, in that despite this continued failure, we keep trying; and hopeful in this very gesture of endurance.

         I approach these issues by creating a photographic world that, like the uncanny, is unnerving because of its familiarity. The uncanny hints at another world, but its power lies in its closeness to our own, in its unsettling tie to reality and its expression of the otherness that is always present in our own world. This otherness is marked by both a loss of comfort and the search for new and unusual methods of consolation. I am interested in absurd and illogical attempts to reconstruct such ideals, despite their simultaneous failure and success. By highlighting the uncanny in our world, I show traditional conceptions of comfort, wholeness and perfection to be constructed and impossible ideals.