THE UNITY OF OPPOSITES
This series of photographs is, at its core, a meditation on the dichotomy between normal and strange and the nature of our compulsion to categorize and qualify aspects of reality. What began as a curiosity with one set of opposites, evolved into a fascination with contradictions in general. In attempting to pinpoint and capture both the everyday and the anomalous, I found them to be deeply contingent on each other; the existence of one demands and influences the existence of the other. Our understanding of reality seems to hinge on defining things by what they are not and by situating qualities on scales of opposition. The unity of opposites--a belief system concerned with metaphysical contradictions-- asserts that humanity's means of qualifying or assigning value to reality is dependent on continuums; up, back, and left exist only when situated relatively to down, forward, and right. Furthermore, it suggests a level of coexistence between even mutually exclusive opposites, such as life and death, silence and noise, normalcy and strangeness. My approach to understanding and depicting the ordinary and the unusual shifted from one of division to one of conjunction. Instead of drawing a stark contrast between the two, I began to focus on the ways in which contradictions find genesis in their counterparts. In what ways are our perceptions of the strange and abnormal born out of the normal, and how can this phenomenon be represented visually?