Personal Statement, “Overflown and Emptied,” 2017 Revised 8/29/2025 Katrina hit New Orleans twenty years ago. Eight years ago, sitting with my cat in my Bucktown apartment, divorced and drinking, I wrote, “Eleven years ago, I had every intention of writing a statement for “Overflown and Emptied” (2006). Feeling that it wouldn’t be sufficient, or that I hadn’t had the time to process my experience, I decided to wait. It’s hard to believe that more than a decade and so much of life has passed since then, and there are still insufficient words. I’ll make an attempt.” Even now in recovery I still don't have words, and every time I look at the series, I remember how gut-wrenching - how profound and visceral – it was to see the gutted near-wasteland of my home. I lived outside of New Orleans for only a year and a half total of my 25 years of life, then. I just finished my first semester of grad school in Montana, then. I felt alone in the unfathomability of this alien landscape among my new friends and partner at the time, then. I felt comforted going through routines that were more familiar to me, like working at my college job over the winter break and going to bars strung together by military-patrolled streets, then. In 2017 I wrote, “One night, in that 2005 December, I stood on the porch of the house I had lived in for a couple years, the first location I had all to my own, for which I paid $425 a month. I trespassed into the property – but there was no more lock on the door. Its floor, where I had danced with abandon in a ballet costume on Halloween, was entirely warped. The refrigerator slanted next to the kitchen counter, where on my birthday my sister-in-law Elizabeth made me a delicious quail. Next to that room, we had watched – on VHS because that’s how things worked then – a National Geographic special about crazy ass animals. It was so fucking hot – the gas stove had no qualms about double-acting as a heater. I’m a July kid.” “The watermarks were at about eight feet. Had I lived there I would have drowned.” “I took photos of my place, grateful no one had moved in. I made this work in part based on those images. I also took my camera around the neighborhood in which I grew up, where I walked on my first day back, finding Duane amidst ruins of homes, where he was repairing.” I didn’t write about how I screamed and sobbed on the porch of my devastated apartment, drowning in the personal flood of memories and experiences. How it and I felt completely lost. How this experience would be my first realization of my dissociation. Then, in 2017, fresh from a divorce and sick with dissociated self-destruction, that I didn’t know in 2005 that life as I thought I knew it would disappear again. I worked in both “thens,” using familiar imagery to process, build, and repair myself. I’m still in the stages of repair. Like the ever-sinking pilings and cracking foundations of homes built on a swamp, my experiences are all a part of my own shifting and changing and becoming. My language is still visual. My heart will break again. It will be ok, and we will survive and grow: In 2017 I thought that “Our best bet, living in this carnivalesque dream, seems to be to just keep on – day by day. Whatever this particular bubble in the world brings, roll with it without bursting. And, have a plan. Mine is to – I don’t know, survive survive then grow.” That was my evolution then. In 2025 this is my best for now.