I have always had an obsession with dreams. It started when I was young, waking up from a dream where I had gotten the PS Vita my parents promised me only to wake up confused, without that promise, in another life. In that brief moment, I couldn’t remember who I was. When it eventually came back to me, I felt as if the lines of reality were so thin I could see the ghostly warm images of those fantasies right through the veil. Those lines became ever more thin as I daydreamed, maladaptive right to the skin, seeing the late afternoon sun drench lonely hallways and classrooms, wondering what any grade school kid wonders. That feeling was thick like honey, imbued and ever present in my self and psyche. But as I grew older, I faced troubles in my life. The brain pushes trauma down, and it pushes everything else along with it, including those sweet feelings and memories of my childhood.

I got better; however, I had agency again, and I explored not only the world but also myself, and I came to realize that those memories, that person, are still there. Although fragmented, I can experience them in small waves. It’ll always be something small but that is uniquely American: the scent of the grass as someone mows their lawn, the way the light comes into those desolate suburban homes, sitting on those green generators in our neighborhoods and feeling the hum. Even small things, like how brands presented their products or stores, the UI designs of websites, and earlier Internet content on YouTube—it was a completely different world, one that was inviting, one that felt safe, and one that felt like it was going to last forever and every promise that it made with it. We thought we were going to get a different future, but we didn't. The mid-2000s is a nostalgic fantasy now, but it still feels and looks the same as it always did in my mind, and that is something I desperately want to re-create. I always found so much frustration in not being able to share the images in my mind and the feeling that it invokes.

I have intense, vivid, visceral, and oceanic dreams. Whatever I may be dealing with, I will have an intense dream about it, and I always wake up the same, wondering who I am and where I am. You're like a new born fawn running in the woods as dawn sets, innocent and unreachable. The way you view the world in those brief periods after waking is exactly how you viewed it as a child. I say oceanic because, when you are a child, there is no distinction between you and other things, between you and people, or between you and the Earth. Class, race, and identity are foreign concepts; you are one with yourself, others, and the earth. This slowly erodes over time; childhood innocence is brutalized in one way or another, and so what fascinates me is that as dreams take you back, your distinction is gone in those dreams, and your distinction is gone in those waking periods.

That is why I started this art project, “the new American fantasy.” I want my photos to look like those memories, those fantasies. Fantasies that I can see in small quiet moments in my life that invoke that same feeling of when I was young. How that memory looks in my head, how it feels in my body. Instead of just feeling like I live between those two worlds, I can capture it. Through this lens of American nostalgia, which now is an American fantasy that is so recent, I want to tell the story of a life we all just lived but seems so out of our reach. It is an ever-growing world that everyone growing up in that era understands and can relate to. I try and achieve this through specific lenses, expired film, and older digital cams. This will be an ever-evolving project of mine. I hope this can be a meditative viewing experience for others that comforts them in the way it comforts me.