Artist Statement

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

The word myth is most commonly used to describe something false that is nonetheless widely believed. The internet is full of articles such as “15 Myths About Weight Loss” and “The Myth of Love: Why Romance is a Hoax!!!” In the latter example, myth takes on a sinister value, as though what is elusive or metaphysical is a cloak behind which lurks someone who wants to deceive you. But there’s another earlier meaning of myth (or mythos), an original meaning, that, to the contrary, speaks of an authentic, collective human experience.

These images are a collection of everyday moments which I have filtered through my own idea of what is beautiful and true. None of these images is exactly the way it happened.

This is how it was:

This is the truth: