Nick
Meyer

Either Limits Or Contradictions

I am afraid of dying and this is my attempt to circumvent my own death.
This project was not begun with that fear in mind, but over the course of five years as people in my life died and gave birth and life slowed, I started to see the cycles forming in the work. I looked back into the photo’s that my father had created for us; a record to look back on to affirm ourselves of our obvious youth. I these pictures I saw the people who are now gone and looked for the people who didn’t get have the opportunity to be pasted into the pages of my history by my father before he died. The same cycles that were forming in my work were already in these family photos. The people, who, in my life, I have hugged, loved and mourned become Grandmother, Father and Friend with no names or histories attached in these albums. These stories are not mine.
As my world has become more and more vulnerable I realize that the people in my pictures have become less and less mine and now exist as stand-ins for whoever, wherever and whatever.
Either Limits or Contradictions is broken into three parts. The first part We Wont Need Bright lights, Gonna Make our own Lightning, a line from a Neil Diamond song. A rock song: Faster paced and selfish. It is looking at the hedonism, healing and self-discovery of our salad days. A scrape heals. The world turns. Things don’t have beginnings or endings. Book two is taken from a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem, It Is Heavenly Weather. This is a break, a means to stop and slow down; a call to pay attention to the infinity that came before us and will follow after. The final part, Mists and Exhalations, a line from John Milton’s blank verse poem Paradise Lost, is a realization of life and death and time and the cyclical nature of our lives. It is looking critically at the highs and lows, the permanence and impermanence that is the make up and fear of connectivity.
I made these pictures as a reminder that things pass. That I will pass and you will pass, a tree will fall and the sun will set, and then it will happen again. It is a memorial of a life being lived. A meditation on pacing and prose and letting things unfold. These pictures are a means of facing truths and accepting fate.