The Tolerant Mind @ Soho Photo Gallery
7/23/25 - 8/17/25
The tolerant mind explores the absurd premise
The tolerant mind makes sure
The tolerant mind asks questions
The tolerant mind changes course
The tolerant mind courts failure
The tolerant mind _______________________
And if you filled in the blank,
The tolerant mind is yours.
“The Tolerant Mind” is a photo installation of studio portraits of balloons floating in space, held just before drifting out of reach. It’s about ideas that rise—uncertain, shifting, and alive.
This work explores the space between letting go and holding on—how our thoughts can shift and evolve while guided by quiet purpose.
Exposures made 2017
Realized 2025
Full Exhibition Statement
“The tolerant mind explores the absurd premise... what happens next is the reason we do it.”
The Tolerant Mind invites viewers into a space of active contemplation—a space where openness, contradiction, and imaginative risk are not just tolerated but necessary. This installation celebrates the creative and intellectual act of engaging with what seems irrational, implausible, or absurd, not to dismiss it, but to follow it toward transformation.
In this world, ideas are represented by floating balloons—fragile, buoyant, untethered to certainty. Each balloon carries a premise: scientific, emotional, philosophical, or spiritual. As they drift and collide, they intersect in midair, and it is precisely in these intersections that something new emerges. These points of contact form temporary geometries—shifting shadows, surprising alignments—which evoke the moment of confluence where two once-separate thoughts merge into a deeper understanding.
The installation doesn’t ask for conclusions. It invites participation in a process: to observe, reflect, question. To witness how the absurd becomes meaningful, how contradiction generates beauty, how the act of holding space for conflicting ideas creates unexpected patterns—not chaos, but a kind of spontaneous order.
By walking among the balloons, the viewer steps into the tolerant mind itself: a mind that accepts uncertainty, entertains improbable connections, and embraces the unknown—because what happens next is the reason we do it.
How This Exhibition Came To Be
The Tolerant Mind project originated as an creative exercise during the summer of 2017. I was using a number of objects, including balloons to test new lights.
I began experimenting playfully with the balloons over four to five studio sessions, using various photographic techniques including long exposures and multiple flash pops to create strobe effect.
This wasn't a planned project, but simply a spontaneous exploration - a chaotic burst of undirected creative energy.
Later that year during an image / text workshop, I revisited these photographs, created more, and wrote the poem "The Tolerant Mind" to accompany them - a concept that emerged from a playful, non-judgmental approach to creating art.
Aside from a single hand-made book created in 2020 (created while learning InDesign and book layout) and a failed attempt to "shoot more to finish the project" in 2021, it lay dormant on my hard drive, always active in my mind - never clear on how to finish it.
Now a new member of Soho Photo Gallery, we were on the move and creating a tabloid to introduce ourselves to our new neighborhood - we all submitted 3 images that best represented "ourselves and our work" - one of my tolerant balloons was selected for inclusion (last image / back cover) so i took that as a sign that it was time for this project to be fully realized in the form of this exhibition.
And I can't think of a more fitting way to introduce myself and my work - it was an inspired selection for the tabloid and I'm proud this is my first solo exhibition.
After the Image: Framing Absurdity into Meaning
This body of work was not born from a concept — it emerged from play. The photographs came first. The meaning followed.
Created through instinctive experimentation with balloons, lights, and long exposures, these images were initially visual exercises — bursts of creative impulse with no intended narrative. But meaning is not always planned. Sometimes, it is discovered in retrospect, after the shutter closes and silence returns.
In reflecting on the images, I found myself asking: What am I really seeing here? These floating forms, intersecting lines, and flickers of motion began to suggest something else. They invited interpretation, invited absurdity, invited belief.
The project became self-referential. The photographs are not just images — they are documents of their own making. The improvisation, the repetition, the spontaneous decisions — all are imprinted in the work itself. What you see is both the subject and the process that shaped it. The act of photographing became the content of the photographs.
The result is a kind of visual thought experiment. Meaning arises not from a predefined concept, but from the viewer’s engagement with the traces of experimentation. The images ask you to consider not just what they depict, but how they came to exist — and what happens when you hold space for ambiguity.
In this way, the viewer becomes a co-creator. The image is a proposition, and your interpretation completes it. Not everything needs to make sense to matter. The absurd, the unstable, the open-ended — all can yield clarity, if not resolution.
These photographs are not documents. They are sites of contemplation. They are artifacts of their own creation. And what happens next — what emerges from within the playful, the unplanned, the unexplained — is the reason we do it.