In My Dreams I See Wheat

2022

Screenprint

11 x 8.5''

Edition Varied

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Longing depicts a friend of mine, Marie Alvarez, when we were both on an exchange trip in Takayama, Japan. Inspiration came initially from a photo I took of a fellow group of students. They were staring out the 5th floor of a school building’s windows, towards mountains only blocks away. The smell of rain and green things growing blew through the open windows, and my hair. Marie was not in that initial photo, but her stance looking elsewhere, leaning on a window frame, conveyed the “wishful” emotions I was inspired by. Her posture made it possible to remove “background” information from the image, like clouds, or the frame. She is isolated but her face is open. The lack of sharp straight lines in most of the image adds fluidity and dream-like qualities. 

 

My reinterpretation of Marie’s hand makes it disappear next to her hair without close visual inspection. From afar, she loses her positionality, but moving closer you can start to envision what setting Marie would be in, resting on her arms like so. The lack of context clues leaves what Marie would be looking at (or for) up to the viewer. For friends of Marie, and that includes myself, this image captures a part of her personality. Calmness, serenity, but also the 70’s music whose albums had fluid bubbly text font, and dreams of elsewhere.