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Corner of Awakening

Medium:                          Acetate and found materials
Time:                                2024

           From January 24, 2024 to May 23, 2024, I have woken up almost every night. Sometimes it is at 2am. Other times it is at 4. A few times, it has been at 6. I started staring at the two traffic lights parallel to each other outside the window facing my bed in my university dorm. They were like eyes, switching from green to yellow to red, blinking as if trying to lull me back to sleep. They were always there when the sun wasn't, when it was too early to call my mom to say good morning or to wake my roommate up from her dreamy slumber. They were a constant in my life, just like this sleeping habit became.  Sometimes, when it was dark and there were no cars around to direct, they seemed lonely too.

Later I began to document these wake-ups, finding intrigue in how these lights were able to be captured on my iPhone camera. The same two neon orbs in a sea of pure darkness. As the weather warmed and the sun started rising earlier, the images changed but they were all trapped to a rectangular frame, that of the window and the phone's camera. The grid itself became a powerful motif. 

I began editing these photos in Photoshop as well, printing them out, and exploring different transparencies and ways of layering to create an interesting composition. I layered notes I had written that day with photographs of when I had woken up that night, hoping to find some relation between the two. I never did. 

This piece explores themes of entrapment, darkness, loneliness, human habits, the subconscious, technology and the human body.  

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