Schrödinger’s Cat
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Wildfires - and their impact on our psyches - are growing in intensity and frequency. This series explores the surreal experience of living through an evacuation, and the novel ways the mind bends when grappling with unconfirmed disaster. Each image is a composite of two photos: the first, a detail or scene from home as it was, i.e., “alive,” and the second as it might now be, i.e., “dead.” Photos taken immediately after the 2020 Walbridge Fire in Northern California.
→ Exhibitions & Awards
→ The Story Behind It
→ Available Prints
Where this work has appeared:
Exhibitions & Events
Review Santa Fe, 2023
Conceptual Photography, Juror: Mark Sink, D’Art Gallery, Denver, CO, 2023
Center Forward, Jurors: Hamidah Glasgow, Charles Guice, Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, 2023
The National: Best Contemporary Photography, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, 2022
Transience, Juror: Aline Smithson, Praxis Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, 2022
Words, Words, Words, Juror: Dallas Crowe, Praxis Gallery, Minneapolis, MN, 2022
We Like Small Things, Juror: Jan Christian Bernabe, Filter Photo, Chicago, IL, 2022
The Green Environment, Juror: Douglas Stockdale, Southeast Center for Photography, Greenville, SC, 2022
2022 Juried Members Show, Juror: Gregory Harris, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Denver, CO, 2022
Awards & Collections
Curator's Choice, Transience, Juror: Aline Smithson, Praxis Gallery, 2022
Contemporary Photography Collection, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN, 2023
The story behind it:
In August of 2020, a massive dry lighting storm moved across Northern California. Spooked in the night by the severity of the storm and fearful of getting trapped given our remote location, I scrambled to safety as bolts of electricity zapped the already crispy forest all around me. Just to the northwest, one of these bolts lit what was, at first, just a small fire. With CalFire resources already spread thin, it grew unchecked. Two days later, the mandatory evacuation order came. While such orders are obviously necessary, the cruel irony is that they try to ensure your safety and security while simultaneously ripping you from a primary source of it. Home is, after all, more than just a house.
Schrödinger's Cat is a 1935 quantum mechanics thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrodinger in conversation with Einstein. In it, a hypothetical cat - trapped inside an opaque box with a flask of poison - is considered to be both alive and dead, simultaneously. This “dual state” continues until you look inside the box. Only then, can you resolve the reality. Until that moment, the cat is both alive and dead. Not possibly dead or possibly alive — but alive and dead at the same time.
For three weeks, we waited in open-ended exile. Initially, I was fueled by an unfamiliar mania, flailing around for updates on Twitter, obsessively refreshing my inbox for any updates from neighbors, dutifully tuning in for every CalFire news conference. But information proved to be scarce and even conflicting. After a week or so, exhausted yet unable to sleep, a random memory came to me: learning about Schrödinger’s Cat in high school physics. The way it challenged and bended your mind. Not in what to think, but in how to think.
Was home alive? Or dead? I realized that, as surreal and mentally uncomfortable as it was, allowing both states to be simultaneously true was preferable to the emotional whiplash I’d been caught in so far. The mind naturally wants to grasp on to one reality. However, to exclusively embrace either state felt dangerous, for false hope and false grief can both cut deeply.
As a result, for a very surreal period of time in 2020, home was both alive and dead.