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A Journey Through ‘The Windows of My Studio’

By Miss Rosen on February 9, 2018

3:57pm November 27, 2011 – Port of Spain, Trinidad

2:20pm October 9, 2011 – Jacmel, Haiti

1:50pm November 26, 2011 – Port of Spain, Trinidad

“Wherever you go, there you are,” Confucius observed, explaining one of the inherent paradoxes of life. The nature of the human mind is one of an eternal quest, a seeking for answers – or maybe even the questions themselves.

We come to this earth without words, able to communicate through gesture, facial expression, guttural sounds and tones. It is enough to keep up going during our earliest, most vulnerable period of life but soon we are compelled to go beyond this visceral state. We are given words, words, and more words and shown how and when to use them: how to ask, how to answer – and, ultimately, how to think.

Life then becomes a process of accumulation until it reaches the tipping point and we discover that we are trapped inside losing paradigms made by lesser minds. It is then that our search takes a powerful turn, as we are forced to unwire our programming in the search for truth, undergoing the pain of stripping away lies that have shaped our identity in the most intimate and profound of ways.

This journey in inevitable although some may wish never to go, digging their heels in through denial, distraction, or delusion. But even within that, the yearning occurs, as we catch ourselves gazing out the window wondering, “What if? What is? What could be?”

It is here, in this moment of quiet repose, that our imagination is set free, able to launch itself into the world of possibility. This possibility is the essence of hope – the thing we dare not to say aloud for fear that it might escape our grasp. We hold it close to our heart, so close it lives in silence until the courage comes, to see out in the world whom we are truly meant to be.

American photographer Wyatt Gallery has stood before this very window many places in the world, gazing out into a distant horizon and seeing what lies beyond. He has raised his camera to capture the view in a series of never-before-published photographs titled The Window of My Studio.

In dream analysis, the home stands for the self. It is here that we discover a metaphor for the way our being expresses itself through personality, character, thinking, and behavior. Our feeling of home speaks to how we feel and what we believe about who were truly are. But it is the windows that speak to where we wish to go.

Gallery’s photographs in this series are a portrait of the artist as a young man: sometimes open, sometimes closed, sometimes somewhere in between. Most times the view is partially obscured so that we can stand in this netherworld, where questions and answers meld away – and the search is all.

To be honest, there is nothing inherently romantic about truth. It will strip you of your illusions and most people aren’t ready to be nude. It’s a vulnerable space, but what’s more, you must create new, rational, and realistic devices to succeed in this world. Is it any wonder most of us would prefer to stay in a permanent state of search, where the thrill comes from what is not, rather than what is?

There is beauty here. There is mystery. There are a thousand emotions jacked all the way up swirling in a sonorous symphony. There is feeling and knowledge of being alive as your blood pounds from your heart and sends tingles up your spine. There is fantasy and there is passion. It is an affair that never ends – until it ganks you back down to earth. You are caught out there, in a prison of your own design, and then the windows become the only thing you have left – well, that and your imagination, to repeat the cycle all over again.