Artist's Statement (Music Mosaic)

            The piece of music from which I drew inspiration for these images represents, to me, themes of both hope, and despair.  It is, in the beginning, completely solemn. But as it progresses towards the end, there seems to be a glimmer of hope that’s just out of reach, and you don’t even know if it’s really there or not. 

With my photos, I tried to emulate this same sort of feel I had when listening to the song.  For instance, some of the images seem to be ones of despair, some of obvious hope, and a few ambiguous ones, or at least I would hope so.  A conscious effort was made to make the photos represent paths or tunnels, or basically something with an end-point, as if the other side could be reached.  Some of these “paths” are dark and some are light.  Some have brightness at the end, and others do not. 

When a decision I’ve made takes me down a new path, it always has the potential to take on any one of the above qualities.  Before the decision is made, one would hope the resulting path is light and bright at the end, like one of the included images.  Obviously, things don’t always turn out that way and the only choice remaining is to go forward.  In an attempt to represent this, nearly all of the images in which a darkness must be gone through, the path is very enclosed and there is really only one way through to get to the distant brightness, that glimmer of hope that feels so far off.  The hopeful pictures even have boundaries, but they are less intimidating ones that still allow the path to be filled with light. 

And then there are a few images that aren’t as clear as to what type of path they are.  The song I picked has what could be identified as either a hopeful pick-up or an intensifying of the despair.  I often have felt unsure when going down a few of my own paths, not knowing the outcome or how challenging the journey would even be, but like the other images, there’s an end point to which the eyes are drawn, and that’s the only place to go. 

There are plenty of different paths available to us, and sometimes we can’t even control the ones we go down, but you have to cling to the light at the end and persevere towards it.  That is what I gathered from the song, and what I tried to represent with my images.