Tat Tvam Asi - The Universe is a Mirror

Twelve years ago, I turned my lens towards my father caring for my mother, battling an incurable terminal illness. I knew I couldn’t stop my mother from disassembling, but making photographs of them allowed me to stop time, and editing allowed me to reverse it. After a decade-long fight, my mother took her last breath on August 9, 2022. Astronomers have revealed that when a star dies, its outer layers explode into a powerful supernova, creating some of the most energetic events in our galaxy. My mother was my star, and witnessing her transition was a colossal experience for me. What was long-feared as a crippling moment of loss came with some unexpected and striking revelations. The days that followed her transition were filled with Hindu rituals of death and ancestry that felt tribal, intentional, and methodical. These customs were designed to offset sorrow by focusing one's energy and attention on the arrangement of ingredients, geometry, and performance. I found myself amid these simple yet elemental ceremonial practices, which placed my family in careful concert with selected objects and actions meant to honor my mother’s life, death, and journey onward.

My intention to trace my mother’s footsteps in her afterlife felt akin to mankind’s ageless curiosity for signs of life in our galaxy. I started researching celestial bodies like Jupiter, Venus, and Europa. Inspired by astrology and astronomy, I began crafting a narrative straddling a dialogue between scripture and science, natural and constructed, and life and afterlife. I drew invisible lines of connection between photography and sculpture, objects and stories, between her time on Earth and her journey onward. As the project has evolved, the past and the future have collapsed, bending time and space and folding reality into fiction. The worlds in this series combine personal history, Hindu iconography, and the scientific possibility of life on other planets. To realize my vision, I worked with an entire team of craftspeople in Mumbai, India. I start with a sketch of my narrative and build layers to my exacting specification; those layers are arranged and collaged into place, and then the scenes are activated with live-action moments and human subjects. This project is an homage to our eternal evolution, the interconnectedness of life and death, and a visual speculation for where my mother’s soul might be in this vast, infinite, and spectacular Universe.