IMAGO

Memory tricks us into remembering people and experiences as more perfect than they were. An idealized mental image of a pivotal caregiver can forever alter and influence our behavior.

Imago Relationship Therapy* teaches us that by understanding this "unconscious image of familiar love” as an opportunity for growth, we can heal conflict within ourselves and our relationships. Revelation in hand, the impetus for IMAGO was threefold:

• A desire for my collaborators and I to process our parents’ recent passing by channeling our loss into something tangible, soulful, and cathartic.

• Renaissance vanitas paintings using objects to symbolize the fleeting nature of life and the inevitability of death, while admonishing our vain preoccupation with earthly indulgences and accomplishments.

• A vision for an installation that approximated sunrise / nightfall in the desert with its accompanying temperature shifts and sounds.

IMAGO was an ambitious video project led by a friend-in-the-making, and accomplished photographer, Kyle Mutter. Watching Kyle toil over the placement of each and every object, I grappled with the my own inexorable struggles with idealized love. Nevertheless, we agonized over angles by degree, painstakingly repositioning a single strand of thread, fetishizing objects of absence in devotion to those we lost. Our sensitivity to detail grew infinite, as though we’d been given the chance to reach out and touch our parents one last time.

Was this idolatry a healthy display of admiration or affection? Or would this hyper-focused reverence for someone lost truncate our recovery, trapping us in a room filled with memories of humans that would never return? Would these larger-than-life figures forever haunt our dreams, prolong our mourning, obliterate our relationship to time, and amplify every subsequent loss? What if this newfound journey left us in an endless state of searching, weathered from overexposure to grief, postponing our recalibration, and return, to real life?

In the end, we gave ourselves permission to let the video embrace this collective obsessing by exalting evanescence, honoring the impermanence of our existence.