Falling Away

“A creative train of thought is set off by; the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, and the impossible.” (Asger Jorn, the Danish founder of COBRA)

Lapsus is not a permanent state. The origin of the word from the Latin lapsus, from labi 'to glide, slip, or fall' the verb reinforced by Latin lapsare 'to slip or stumble.' Rather, Lapsus is an involuntary mistake, a brief or temporary failure of concentration, memory, or judgment.

This is the space where my photographs exist.
I have employed the metaphors of Halloween (All Souls Night) in this body of work to explore this condition.

Halloween is traditionally the night when the veneer of the controlled material world lapses (glides) into the otherness of the spiritual. It is a temporary state where subconscious fears bubble to the surface in a display of condemned bravado. Corporeality, carnality, pain, suffering, death and judgement are celebrated. These are the dark primal fears of the human condition. We assume the guise of ghouls, devils, corpses, angels, innocents and sinners in an imagined afterlife.

According to Freud's early psychoanalytic theory, ‘Lapsus Freudiano’ represents a missed deed that hides a sub- conscious desire. We abandon ourselves to this slip of memory- ‘lapsus memoriae.’

My photographs fall between the fluid, unsolidified and molten states of the subconscious (out of focus, noisy, shaky and saturated) and the semblance of measurable reality and clarity (seeking focus and stability) of the conscious mind.

The images were captured at night on the crowded streets of West Hollywood. I was initially discouraged by the the distortion captured by the camera; the consequences of a jostling, boisterous crowd. The images appear to dissolve and dematerialise as is the human condition.

However, true to the concept of ‘Lapsus,’ the images reveal a deeper truth and essence than if they followed the rules of documentary photography. The photographs hold that symbolic moment between the existent and the lost.