a different, better self was a site responsive installation for NONSTNDRD, featuring photographs and text from my series The Parts combined with materials borrowed from the National Building Arts Center. The installation is a loose reflection on the passage of time over the course of a day (the movement of light), the season (the movement of water), and a lifetime (the movement of emotional memory). a different, better self features two sets of photographs printed on reflective aluminum: three images of the Missouri landscape (one urban, one suburban, one rural) shot during the locked-down spring of 2020, and three images of a beam of light moving through the architecture of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, where I had a solo exhibition in 2021. The featured text, applied directly to the bunker in spray chalk (a temporary and changeable medium designed to erode over time), questions the role of empathy as a central lens of understanding, highlighting implicit challenges in the mandate to love: one wall reads “the shadow institution of kindness,” and the other “the part of you that rages underneath all that tenderness.” The exhibition’s title is also drawn from The Parts: an excerpt of the statement, “In isolation, you imagine you might be able to become a different, better self: someone who gardens, someone who’s calm.”