pale blue (2022-present)

In the summer of 2022, I moved to Chicago alone. While looking for apartments online, I saw one that I suddenly knew I would live in, and I rented it 30 minutes after seeing it in person. The apartment had pale blue walls, crown molding, uneven wooden floors, and only three doors, leading to the bathroom, the closet, and the outside. It was the first place I’d lived in without white walls, without distinctly separated rooms, and completely by myself. This is the physical and psychological space from which Pale Blue originated.

The more time I spent alone in my apartment, the more obsessed with it I became. It felt like we were inextricably linked, like I was only myself within its four walls. Before I lived alone, I defined myself primarily by my relationships, and often those that involved cohabitation – I thought of myself as a daughter and a sister when I lived with my family, as a friend and a roommate in college, and as a partner when I lived with my boyfriend. In each of these self-definitions, my responsibility to my home and those I was sharing it with felt clear, if subject to some anxieties and frustrations. In my solitude, the way I was supposed to be felt fuzzy. Living in the absence of other people brought up questions about myself – how real or important were all my private thoughts and experiences? Was I the truest version of myself in this isolated space? In addition to the above features, my apartment was also on the ground floor with windows that directly faced the street. In the absence of cohabitation, I found myself not only personifying the apartment itself, but living in the space as if it was a stage for passers-by, my performance reinforcing my existence. Photography became a tool to explore this new relationship between home and self, and then bringing in other ephemera realized my experience more fully on the wall.

Pale Blue focuses on solitude in the domestic space, which can feel at times fearful, at times joyful, and often full of expectation. In this work, I explore the experience of spending most of my time alone in a small apartment and the ways that experience is freeing yet isolating. The work is diaristic in nature, asking the viewer to engage deeply with my internal experience. My photographs are part of multimedia wall collages utilizing self-portraits, still lives, interiors, vernacular photographs, handwritten journal fragments, and personal ephemera. Pale Blue prioritizes vulnerability, confession, and intimacy. Ultimately, in this work, I take inventory and make meaning of the sometimes mundane, sometimes dramatic, and intensely private experiences of my daily life lived alone.