I chose to use an old post-bound ledger because I could continually extend its size and easily re-collate photos into alternate sequencing. I tried to imagine how this book would operate 40 years in the future if I proceeded to add pages. What intrigues me the most is, at a certain point, it would cease to function as a working book with a series of images and amalgamate together as a singular, sculptural form.

As my examination came to encompass the cyclical routines and linear progression of people, places, and objects around me, I questioned myself several times as to what importance these images even have. What insight could someone, even myself, gain from photos of an old cast-iron stove being lugged from one state to another? What does it mean to make over 20 photos of the same street corner that was once the site of your elementary school bus stop? What does it mean to repair a fence knowing it will just have to be repaired again?

What I ended up coming back to time-and-time-again was, strangely enough, the alchemical saying solve et coagula—which means you must dissolve things down into their constituent parts in order to reform them into something better.

At the same time I was thinking about that, I ended up making anticipatory photos of my eventual breaking off from my hometown; a space that, for me, divided into two categories: an ever-repeating cycle of unchanging landscapes, and its inhabitants which linearly progress over time. Of course, everything is in a state of flux but some actions, such as the landscape changing, are so perceptually minute that, phenomenologically, it feels like they are simply repeating year-after-year. Even when something did happen, like a tree falling over from a storm, the action felt, ultimately, like an insignificant perturbation.