'Medicine Cabinet,' Solo Exhibition, Carrboro Arts Center, 2019
Medicine Cabinet
Hidden behind bathroom mirrors and off limits to curious guests, medicine cabinets are where we keep our personal tools to cope, to live, and to thrive. Yoga, meditation apps, social media, antidepressants, sage sticks, and magic mushrooms. How do we choose our remedies? When are they helpful tools and when do they consume us?
Discussions around mental health, like politics and identities, are routinely flattened into binaries and categories. I wanted to concentrate on the many contrasting elements that simultaneously exist within us. My self-portrait may look like me at my worst, but every brushstroke that generates the picture is an indication of me at my most alive, dynamic, and free. Things are often two different things at once, and that’s what makes life worth living.
Photos by Juli Leonard
