Are you secretly haunted by all the ‘things you wanted to say but never did’?
Then Filipino artist Geloy Concepcion offers you a unique way to finally share them. When, three years after immigrating to the US, the photographer found himself facing a mental and artistic crisis, he turned to past work to try and rekindle his passion for the medium. While looking through his images he was drawn most to his b-roll shots, the blurry, over-and-under exposed stills that were rejected or deemed ‘unusable’. They made him think of an Instagram poll he launched a year prior, asking the question ‘What are things you wanted to say, but never did?’. An idea was forged and a new collaborative art project born. Using google forms and promising complete anonymity, Concepcion started to gather lost words and phrases, collecting intensely personal messages people wanted to share but never found the right outlet for. The artist became curator and started to pair these confessionals with his own photographs, altering them so that often only white silhouettes of those portrayed remain. This deceptively simple technique proved the perfect way to share this universal poetry of loss, disappointment and despair. What’s striking to me about this community driven endeavor, is how comforting it can be to read people’s darkest thoughts, perhaps proving that the world wide web doesn’t have to be as dauntingly lonesome as it sometimes appears. Scrolling through the collages felt quite cathartic because Geloy succeeds in capturing the beautiful and unique sadness of human existence in such a thoughtful way. Last week I was confronted with the sudden loss of a family member and I honestly didn’t feel like writing a curator’s corner. But then I recalled this project and it made me wonder, as one is bound to do, that if my cousin had been able to share some of the thoughts that drove him to that most desperate act, perhaps he would still be with us. So I hope that, through Geloy’s stunning work, you or those you care about feel able to share those thoughts that burden the most and above all, it helps people to feel like they’re not alone in the world to have them.
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