It was October 2018. As an artist juggling a plethora of part-time jobs and just barely getting by financially in San Francisco, I boarded a redeye to DC for a friend’s wedding. I left DC in 2015 to pursue an MFA in San Francisco. As I struggled there, not only financially but also socially, I remembered with mixed feelings the previous life I left behind in DC. While I had meaningful friendships, something I would fail to obtain in San Francisco, my job dominated my life and made me miserable. This eventually led to the crisis point of making the gamble to leave it all behind and pursue a likely forever unstable future as an artist.
As I sat on the plane in the dark, I was unable to entertain myself through the insomnia and thought about all the moments that led up to this point. The meaningful friendships I had in DC were strained due to my absence to the point that I questioned just how meaningful they were in the first place. I was happy for my friend who was getting married, but it also reminded me of how alone I felt. It was my decision, in a way, to isolate myself in the socially cold and hyperbolically expensive atmosphere of San Francisco, but spending every waking moment on either making artwork or working to just barely get by only increased my sense of isolation. I was both the most fulfilled I had ever been and the emptiest I had ever felt simultaneously. I thought of my friend whose wedding I was about to attend and realized I will never have what he has with his partner.
In the darkness, I looked straight ahead of me and saw the ghost of myself staring back with empty eyes in the void of the unilluminated TV screen on the back of the seat in front of me. I saw only a shell of what was once human. This moment in time connected my current frame of mind with my long history of averting my eyes from my reflection and the relationship between that aversion and all the accumulated moments from childhood to now that resulted in the invalidation of my personhood. I wanted to capture that moment of clarity so I could trace the breadcrumbs back to the younger me, to the source of my depression. It’s not that I saw answers to questions, but rather that I saw, there in the dark void of my reflection, a trail that led to the beginning; to the possibility of someday knowing what the questions should have been from the start. I took out my smartphone and captured a single photograph as a way of holding onto access to this wormhole to a previous self. This became Invisible Self Portrait: Point of Departure.
Aaron Wilder, Invisible Self Portrait: Point of Departure, 2018, Digital Photograph
Later, when looking back at the rectangle of pixels in which my face is barely distinguishable from the darkness, I did not know what to do with it. Like an anthropologist, I approached this minimal photograph as a series of ruins to analyze for signs of life through the tools available to me. I experimented with manipulating the image digitally in countless ways. Part of what I wanted to find was a notion of making the invisible more visible. This eventually led me to Invisible Self Portrait: Outbound as the former and Invisible Self Portrait: Inbound as the follower. Despite the abstraction of Outbound, there is still a connection to the reflection of my physical presence, as slight as it is, and all that is wrapped up in the politics of my observable shell (predominantly the privilege of being white and male). Inbound represents a far more complex and disturbing documentation nearest to how I felt in the moment I took the photograph.
Aaron Wilder, Invisible Self Portrait: Outbound, 2018, Digital Mixed Media
Aaron Wilder, Invisible Self Portrait: Inbound, 2018, Digital Mixed Media
These two versions of the same source image create a conversation, but ultimately felt too static. There was the external and the internal, but what was missing was that wormhole to an earlier self. So, I started experimenting with converting the single still image into frames of what would become a video. I played with the “Threshold” settings in Adobe Photoshop slowly moving the image one degree at a time from completely negative space to completely positive space. The first video resulting from this was a projection of a slow-moving, abstract animation along the color spectrum. I added this as a central element to my installation/solo exhibition/architectural intervention called Expletive Chapel: Lavender Heights at The InsideOut in Sacramento, California in 2019 that predominantly focused on my Expletive project. Created without sound, this first video adaptation of the still image referenced the attachment of my lived experience to queerness by symbolically using the PRIDE flag color spectrum. Separately, I experimented in deconstructing the sounds of derogatory slurs commonly levied against those perceived to be part of the LGBT community and added that sound component to the video that resulted in an enigmatic, almost pious contemplation piece.
Aaron Wilder, Expletive Chapel: Lavender Heights, 2019, Digital Video, 16:42 (watch on Vimeo)
I felt this first video experiment got much closer than the still images to the feeling experienced when I originally captured the image. However, important context still felt like it was missing. Taking the opportunity to use the abstraction explored in the first animation, the second video experiment explored both personal history and the politics of identity and visibility through a kind of video essay entitled Invisible Self Portrait: On Shapeshifting and Privilege. This work seeks to grapple with potentially irreconcilable dualities of internal and external (in)visibility, being oppressed and perpetuating the oppression of others, and recovering from trauma and understanding the origins of trauma. This gray area of simultaneously organic and fabricated binaries is, so far, the closest artistic representation of the painful realization and utter clarity experienced on the redeye to DC in 2018. I see this work as continuous attempts to open doors that only seem to lead to other doors, but the more I spend time with it the closer I feel I am reaching a sense of inner and outer truth.
Aaron Wilder, Invisible Self Portrait: On Shapeshifting and Privilege, Digital Video, 18:43 (watch on Vimeo)
