Madness strips things down to their core.  It takes everything and in exchange offers only more madness, and the occasional ability to see things that are not there.

03.28.06  There were so many beginnings I had to choose one, and since this is a story of anniversaries 03.28.06 seemed the most appropriate.  That is the day I began to hear voices.  They used to scream but over time have subsided into a dull murmur.
Except at bedtime.  At bedtime they like to sing.
It presents itself as a sing-song - Rapid cycling, mixed state bipolar with schizoaffective disorder.

The problem with madness is that you can feel it coming but when you tell people you think you are going crazy they do not believe you.  It is too distant a concept.  Too melodramatic.  You don’t believe it yourself until you have fallen so quickly and so far that your fingernails are the only thing holding you up, balanced with your feet dangling on either side of a narrow fence with your heart and mind directly over center, so that when you do fall it will split you in two.  And split equally.  So there’s not even a stronger side left to win.

I began to break time down.
Smaller and smaller parcels are easier to digest, easier to recognize, easier to bear.
This would be the math:

4 birthdays
3 + 2/3 years
44 months
1377 days (taking into account the leap year)
33,048 hours
1,982,880 minutes
118,972,800 seconds

I would anatomize it further but it might make me appear obsessive.

Over three and one half years I have spent alone amidst these 8 rooms, 7 mirrors, 6 clocks, 2 minds and 199 panes of glass.  And this is what I saw here.  This is what I learned.

I figure it could go one of two ways- I will either capture my ascension from madness to as much a level of sanity for which one of my composition could hope, or I will leave a document of it all, in the case that I should lose.

Bio
I was born, 1968, in Morristown, NJ and graduated, 1990, from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA with a BFA in photography.

The years that followed were comprised of a form of buoyant self-imposed exile that absconded with memory, dignity, propriety & a not insignificant amount of opportunity.  Slowly, with proper diagnosis and treatment, I found myself having lost everything yet given the focus to begin again.

Illness has rendered me housebound and led to a solitary life.  I am a creature of past, proof, memory and imaginary friends.  Throughout it all injuries, individuals, dreams, nightmares, life, still life, & visions of afterlife have been faithfully recorded, processed, printed and when necessary toned, painted or otherwise altered.  I cannot set everything right so I set it on paper.  Some use ink, I confide in silver.

For more information, please contact the Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago. www.edelmangallery.com