Where Is Home?

A story of identity, change, loss, and growth

I was born in California. My childhood days were filled with the endless summer sun against the ocean. I can feel the sand in my feet, and in my clothes. The palm trees sway, the sound of seagulls occasionally breaking the silence of the rhythmic crashing waves. The nostalgia of this time is in high-tide, and I truly find myself missing this place more often than not. This journey that I’ve been on, somehow keeps reaching for these moments I can’t get back.

These slides that you see were taken exactly a year ago (Jan/Feb 2024). At first glance, it feels like a bit of a mistake – on overexposure of film. But this exact mistake is what has sparked this entire question of “Where Is Home?” I shot this roll of film in between New York and Arizona. The film burns completely hide the identity of which photo was taken where. I found myself carefully combing through the grain to find some sort of truth – but there was nothing. Only my imagination of what was behind those photos. And so now what was at first a complete accident has seemed to become the main theme of my life these days. The boundaries of past and present, memory and future have been blurred, all by a simple exposure to light.

I’m back in Arizona now, after having lived in New York for almost 3 years. I’m in the backyard, looking out at the same field, seeing the same mountain as before. I guess it’s a profound thing that the mountain is still there, all this time I had forgotten about it. I returned to the desert last summer, just 5 months after taking those photos. I had no clue I’d be back here. At that point of time, New York was becoming home. Is it still the same place now? Are there mountains there that I have forgotten about?

My return was filled with shock, with tragedy, with grief, and pain. A loss indescribable. A feeling I never knew my heart could endure. But really, it didn’t. It shattered. It’s been a complete upheaval of the self. A siteworks if you will. I’ve blasted away at pieces of my subconscious, revealing the raw earth that I had been budling upon. In this wake, art was the only way I could make sense of these grand feelings. I returned to the question that I first asked myself on that cold winter morning in January. Where is home?

What I began to realize in the still frames was that when rotated, they very much resembled the work of Rothko.  Ironically, I’d been researching Mark Rothko for a film earlier that winter, and had delved into his process, his paintings, his life story. It seemed like I uncovered my own Rothko, a color field of emotion. Applying the same principles of blocking and composition, I began to paint for the first time. Each brush stroke represented tears, and shouts, and memories, and laughter, and sorrow, and everything. Never have I painted with such grand emotion before.

I chose the red film exposure from the slides, as it reminded me of Arizona. Repeatedly I would ask, “am I painting New York or Arizona?” My leaning was the desert because of the colors, but maybe that was me painting my memory of this place. I guess I’ll never know what I painted. But the name “Sunset”, while deceptively simple, dictated my stance on this slide, and the fate of this artwork. Now the series had begun.

This artwork caused a massive inner shift – it was like the tectonic plates of my being had collided and birthed an island of creativity in which I could mine ideas from. Just 4 days later I was ready to make the next piece of the series. I chose the next frame from the roll of film.

This one instinctively felt like New York. Half of the frame being black prompted this observation. And yet, the thin red line at the meeting point of the burnt orange side of the frame seemed to be overtaking the black square. There seemed to be this complete emulsification process happening right before my eyes. Almost like lava consuming the volcanic rock it emanates from. Was the desert taking center stage as my new home? I called it, “Burning”.

Despite this inner search and rescue mission for home, it seemed that California was a part of the search party. It was organizing and orchestrating it. Its presence could not be ignored in this conversation, for my inner child beckoned to be involved. I could see him, little Jonathan, running around the playground at Palms Elementary. I watched him and his mother eat sandwiches on the beach. It feels like a past life. And yet, the following day after painting burning, the Island gifted me once again with a further push in this narrative of home. A plot device, as it were, in this grander character arc.

And so, I had to answer to this call. This inner child that perhaps I have neglected for far too long. When we were living in Arizona, for a while every summer we would go visit California. But as time would pass and life became more established in the desert, those trips would become few and far between. During that time when we all collectively held onto the fringe of the ocean, we had gone to Santa Monica. The photo I took there as a teenager doesn’t seem like much. But up until that point I had never documented the ocean and sky so blatantly as I did that day. And it was this image that kept resurfacing in my mind, almost like one of the burned film exposures – it needed to be painted. In an inversion of what’s ocean, and what’s sky, I made the decision to flip the colors on their head. Something about the darker color being at the top created a weight for me. I could feel the greenish blue pushing down on my psyke like the Aeropress coffee maker might – soft and yet forceful. The extraction was a rich cup of filtered and pure Guatemalan aroma. And yet I could taste the salt. I could sense the sand again. I could feel the seafoam. The ocean became sky and vice a versa. I painted this one over a picture of a Pier on the water, which is where I took this photo. Maybe that’s why I did this. I’m realizing that art is more of a discovery than anything else. This painting always existed in time, I just finally had to make it. I called it, ‘Santa Monica”.

I’m sitting in the front room now. It is very late in the afternoon. The lighting is pure gold. The timing and angle is exactly that of when Mal and Cobb awake from having been in Limbo for decades. Disorienting, jarring, and yet familiar. It’s the same lighting from when they were at the bridge, embraced, looking over the water, laughing, Paris in the background. And it is in this very room in the front that hung a picture of the sea. An overhead shot of the crashing waves on the seashore. Deep blue and a dark pink. 10 days had now passed, and the Island was not done. I stumbled upon a cove in my subconscious, the cliffs blocking the light entirely, casting a vast shadow, creating a cool breeze. The water became freezing, and the sun begin to sink low. I could feel the energy fading. Was this to close the series?  

I took down the canvas and viewed it as blank. It was during this time I made visits to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. I saw the James Turrell Skyspace once again. I remember very vividly that during this time in early September, I was battling with these terrible thoughts, these horrid depictions of reality. I could feel my grasp on this story fading away. I no longer wanted to answer the question. I became numb to the loss of New York, and it had gotten to the point where there was the deepest vacancy within. My soul felt hollow, lifeless, nonexistent. So, as I stared at the oculus in the sky of Turrell’s Skyspace, I forgot how exactly I arrived to that moment. “How did I end up back here?” I thought. There was a beauty in the endlessness in the sky I was looking up to, and a fear of self like I had never known possible. In light of this secondary inner uproar, I had to let go of and abandon these terrible self-deprecating thoughts. And so, I painted them in what is the largest canvas I’ve worked on – the canvas of the crashing waves on the seashore. The canvas I saw as blank. I used all the red paint that I could find, and that’s when I made, “Void”.

In the aftermath of this release, came another radical shift. It was now dusk at the inner cove of my mind, and it didn’t matter that the sun was behind the cliffside, for it eventually set, - just like it has now in the front room that I’m still writing from. Dusk was dusk, and the breeze became gentle, and the thoughts in my mind became quiet, still, and at peace. The fading light of that time, made my vision grainy, reminding me of this journey that I had set out on. Where is home? Where am I now? I began right at the beginning of this thought, having gone through the full breadth of my emotions, with the first slide. I was now ready to revisit and paint. If you look carefully at the frame, you will find the word “Two Thousand and Seventeen” playing softly on the TV. This is the second to last guaranteed frame that I shot in New York. This is “2017”

Finally, the waves of reprieve came flowing back in, and by now I had hiked to the top of the cove of my inner mind, to witness the moonlight against the ocean water. I was in the trenches, in the weeds of my own thoughts for so long – I had yet to take a step back from it all. I was so immersed in the ascent that I forgot why I was climbing in the first place. And when I added it all up and did the math of my existence, the resulting shade was a dark blue. The deepest blue of the dusk sky. So deep of a blue that its difference from nighttime is practically imperceptible.

Over the course of the next 2 months, I had the chance to see all of my homes in one go. A condensed timeline of this life, of the places, and for the first time I could evaluate and take stock of them as part of a larger whole. At the end of September, me, my mom, and my dad went to California. It was just us three. I felt like a kid again. That child that I had lost track of, was right there waiting for me. I embraced every single moment. I absorbed the air and drank the sun. My feet planted firmly in the wet sand as the waves would wash it all away. Just a week or so later, me Jeremy, Stella, and Marc went to Arcosanti. The prowess of the desert was on full display. I welcomed the warmth and basked in the heat. By now it was October. And at the end of the month, for the first time since having moved back to Arizona, I visited New York.

I visited Home…

Upon returning from this inner odyssey, the deep dark blue awaited me. Sometime in November, I collected every single shade of blue paint that I had and painted on the smallest canvas of this series. I used some sort of glossy blue, mimicking the glistening of the moon off the coast that shone perfectly on the water. In a way this one feels like a mirror and calms me like a cool night does. It is a reminder of the three places, and perhaps a foregleam of a future place. I’m not sure yet. This one is, “Bleue”

In a way, this was the final piece. But something kept nagging away, clawing at my chest and face like an unassuming baby might. Once again, its presence could not be ignored. To distill such complex chapters of life is quite absurd, almost laughable. I feel that after the completion of these 6 paintings, I felt rather stuck in the mud. I was slowly sinking in my own observations of the self and needed some clarity on the sordid transition that had now taken place 6 months prior – the move from forest to desert. I was approaching the one year mark of this question that I’d be longing to answer.

My luggage from the New York trip was right there, awkwardly placed in my closet, waiting for me. It was now early in the morning on the inner island, revealing the obscure objects I could not make out in the middle of the night. I still had the luggage tags from NYC in October. Stored deep in my closet was all of the tags since I first moved to New York – a reality that I had been hiding in the recesses of my mind. The truth was in all of them, and upon this return, I was now ready to piece this puzzle together. This piece is called, “Home”

The frame of “Home” is the cardboard piece I would place under all my canvases for this series. The remnants of colors literally and figuratively frame the story of leaving to New York in 2021, visiting California and Arizona throughout, and returning to the desert in June of 2024.

I believe I’ve found the answer to the question from a year ago. This story has been one of identity, change, loss, and growth. In the end, to place one place over the other would be to contradict the existence and life lived there. It would invalidate it’s very being. Regardless, I’m in this front room still wishing to be back in New York. But perhaps it is the existence and life lived at the present that really counts.

The last piece that remains is not my own, but an object that’s been around since I was born. It is the oval mirror. Like the oculus in the Skyspace, the oval carries its own meaning. The mirror reminds me that each of these places still is home. If a window into the past, it has seen the ocean. It has seen the desert. It has seen the forest. It sees you now. And it asks you, “Where Is Home?”