EXHIBITION STATEMENT:
The images in the book and photo series Too Tired for Sunshine represent a view of the world as I see it, filtered through the lens of my struggles with anxiety and depression. The title refers to the experience of feeling so melancholy that not even a sunny day can raise your spirits.Shot largely in my adopted home of Vermont from 2011 to the present, the images offer a personal interpretation of the Green Mountain State, juxtaposing familiar and picturesque tropes with more surreal, sometimes disquieting, subjects.As a photographer, I’m compelled to document the mundane and absurd aspects of life. I seek to capture small details that others might not notice on first glance and use color and variations in natural light to evoke mood, atmosphere, and emotion. Inspired by the outpouring of people who reached out to say they too use photography as a tool to help cope with depression, I recently created the Too Tired Project, a photo-sharing initiative that aims to help those struggling with depression by offering a platform for collective creative expression. —Tara Wray
MORE INFORMATION:
The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the spring 2019 lecture series Photographing the Invisible: Images and Mental Illness, funded by the SLU Arts Collaborative. Special thanks to Sarah Knobel, assistant professor of Art & Art History, and Yiming Huang ’19.
ARTIST BIO:
Tara Wray is a photographer, writer, and filmmaker. She is a regular contributor to Vice, BUST Magazine, and is photo editor of the literary journal Hobart. She created and curates “Some Days Just Are,” a collaborative photo series pairing photographers from around the world to tell their stories simultaneously. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Vice, Archive Collective Magazine, La Presse, Lenscratch, Humble Arts Foundation, Burn Magazine, Thought Catalog, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Aint-Bad Magazine, among others, and is held in collections at major institutions including Yale University, the University of Notre Dame, Dartmouth College, George Eastman House, and the Amon Carter Museum.