“The essence of normality is the refusal of reality.”
“The Mask We Wear” (2009)—Black Glass Ambrotype—copyright Quinn Jacobson
"We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, or a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.”
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man (1962)
"In the Shadow of Sun Mountain: The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil" is a poignant reflection on the historical and psychological dimensions of land ownership, colonization, and the human experience of mortality.
These photographs and paintings represent an esoteric conflict that’s rooted in our unconscious denial of death. That conflict is the psychological underpinning of the atrocities that happened on this land. I’ve connected these ideas through the content of the images and the materials and processes that I used to make the photographs and paintings. These ideas are represented both symbolically and literally.