Skyler Yixian Liu

How long is a minute? What can you do in a minute? What can you feel in a minute? If you have a story to tell, how long would you need? This is me, sitting in front of the camera for a minute, talking to you in silence.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Personal traumatic experience is a monster that I fight, which seems to stare back at me in emptiness. Nietzsche’s notion of the abyss, however, suggests to me that to live with trauma is to accept it. Some live on with scars, and some fall into the abyss. Nietzsche’s abyss questions if eternal existence is non-existence, is death, is nothingness?

More than any other object, it is the photograph, which is so prized as an object of memory, appearing as it does to capture and hold fleeting moments of the past for us. It is our safety net, our memory knot, the object which most reassures us that the past is not lost. -Deidre Brollo

‘Memory in Pieces’ records an impression of shattered glass fragments. The glass particles hold the memory of their original form. Scattered over the surface of the picture, each appears unique and yet shares united characteristics. I want to explore the connections between their individual existence, and the memory of their relationship as a whole.

Self-portrait to reflect the loss of self in the flow of time passing.

The human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.

-Ocean Vuong