In the installation Oh, But if I Had the Stars of the Darkest Night, I use a timeless storytelling trope—the journey—to interrogate my lived experience of memory, loss, and transition and how my memories overlap and sometimes conflict with my youngest child’s memories from the same period of time. I also query some of the ways in which my experience has been shaped by societal gender expectations of women.
By the Spring of 2021, the stress of working as a teacher during the pandemic in a small town in Texas that, at best, barely followed the CDC protocols, had, for me, catalyzed a reexamination of my life. I began to confront patterns of behavior that were no longer healthy or sustainable for me. Under that pressure, I realized that my partner and I had opposing narratives about our past, present, and future that were tearing apart our marriage. My extended family provided little support, for a variety of reasons, many stemming from intergenerational trauma and expectations for women. In the middle of all this turmoil, my youngest child came out to me as gay.
Film still of Elliot superimposed over all-gender bathrooms at Giant City State Park, 2022
I asked my family doctor if she knew of any resources in our area for gay adolescents. She advised me to take my 13-year-old child to the county LGBTQ clinic. She said that many of her LGBTQ patients dealt with being assaulted on a regular basis and my child would need to learn how to defend themselves.
Before that meeting, I had already begun grappling with the idea of relocating. However, for me, that conversation both brought everything to a head and (likely because I have Complex PTSD) put me into a state of fight or flight. I couldn’t get the picture of Matthew Shepard or the way my community had responded to a small Pride Parade and a Black Lives Matter protest the previous year out of my mind. I remember driving home, packing my Mini Cooper with camping supplies, clothing, and dog food, loading up two of my dogs, and telling my child, “Get in the car. We are going to Illinois.”
“Get in the car. We are going to Illinois.”
Most of my ancestors were lower socioeconomic class immigrants, settler colonialists, and refugees, all of which caused them to be a people perpetually in transition—moving, migrating in search of safety, home, and livelihood. My own life has been much the same.
In this installation, I use sound and moving image to explore the road and driving as a metaphor for the journey of (human) life and the idea that our ability to experience and respond to the world around us is determined to varying degrees by where we are on the road, i.e.- our gender, race, socioeconomic class, psychological state, cultural expectations, and so forth. In my editing, I worked with layering images, overlapping, changing colors, and choppy sound to convey how my experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome—especially the flashback and disassociation—impacts how I experience the world to interrogate how generational trauma continues to impact the present.
Ram Dass once said, “We are all just walking each other home.” I think of that quote often. For me, it epitomizes a respectful, empathetic way of being in the world and provides a framework that can be followed to avoid ‘othering’ ourselves or anyone else. ‘We’ includes all living beings who share our world. It also encapsulates how I attempt to present the people, animals, and landscape in my work.
Ram Dass once said, “We are all just walking each other home.”
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