This series of collages interweaves vintage 33mm slides dated from 1963-64, from a swimming competition juxtaposed with scenes from the escalating war in Vietnam. Pulled from the same moment in history yet recorded in radically different emotional registers, these fragments form an uneasy dialogue. They generate a tension that feels both historical and deeply contemporary.

 

By transforming analog slides into a video format, the moving narrative invites one to examine how hope persists amid adversity and how moments of joy can stand in stark contrast to underlying turmoil. In the slides of swimmers, the suspended gestures: bodies hovering in midair, the effortless motion suggests a limbo between being mindful and mindlessness. In the war images, that sense of possibility collapses into something harder—landscapes scarred by conflict, young soldiers already bearing the weight of decisions made far above them.

 

This work is a reflection on resilience—the human capacity to find optimism even in the darkest times—and questions how history’s contrasting emotions coexist within the collective consciousness.

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