Alternate Reality and Twins

While strolling along a beach, I encountered brush protruding from a mound of sand. Its organic form compelling me to bring it home and reimagine it in a domestic context, trading its gritty origins for the plush, domestic comfort of a faux fur pillow. This act of transformation resonated with my concurrent reading of Michael Coffey’s Beckett's Children: A Literary Memoir, where he explores alternate realities through the concept of “twins,” drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that life is a dialogic, relational exchange of meaning. This notion of “twins” sparked reflections on my own adoption, prompting me to consider alternate realities where I was neither “chosen” nor “given” away, and how these unrealized paths might have shaped my identity and experiences. Through this new insight, I began to merge the dialogue of parallel selves between my personal histories and the potential of alternate realities.

By creating space and a new alternate reality for found artifacts to exist in parallel, I explored my own feelings of displacement both physically and psychically as an adoptee. This new perception led me to explore dislocation through blind-contour line drawings of the interior of different hotel rooms on the hotel stationary. The possibilities of alternate realities enabled me to challenged normal perceptions of sight and everyday understanding of relationships between objects and body.