Altered States of Agoraphobia: The painting above the bed..

Friday, December 24, 2021

The painting above the bed..

Psychic Coordinate Points (PCP#01)

Sometimes I have woken up in my motel room and had no idea where I was in America. The thrift store landscape painting hanging over the bed and reflected in the mirror can be a clue, but not one that can be relied upon. Once in southern California, I woke up from a motel nap with the air conditioner on full and the room had gotten chilly while I slept. When I awoke I thought I was in Grand Junction, Colorado in the wintertime. The painting above the bed was of a snow capped mountain range with a wide river running through it and I assumed it was the Rockies. I wasn’t completely sure where I was until I finally opened the motel room door and was met with that high key full spectrum California sunshine dazzling down through the palm trees into my blinking bloodshot eyes below. It was winter here too. Christmas Eve..

1 comment:

Luppolo FrancescoDecember 24, 2021 at 10:32 AM
Altered states of consciousness or perhaps awareness ... Awareness that life is not easy at all or consciousness if not that of living trying to know each other deeply to get out of our mental traps.
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Welcome

About the photographs: These images are a search for a personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. They can be described as a collection of psychic coordinate points which I have plotted between the imagined America I brought with me from England and the real America I found on my arrival in 2008. These images are half truth and half fiction. They are a psychogeography, filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences so old they were already part of me long before this journey ever began.

A note about the title:  The compulsion to travel, to move from one place to another, has been with me my whole life. Whether it be local, national or international, I have always found myself either in motion or, if not, I have been dreaming about it. Paradoxically, it has been in the periods of dreaming that Agoraphobia, (which Google defines as “Extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one's own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult”) has gripped me and, at times, crippled me. These photographs are my continued (once secret) revolt against it in the United States of America today, despite recent quarantines.