Through a series of photographic works Joshua Schaedel will work with architecture of the space to illustrate the complex relationship with his father. Curated by Sara Knelman."In therapy, the phrase ‘taking the power back’ is often provided as a way to justify moving forward, past mental and emotional blockages. This mindset provides a necessary way of pushing forward, past the destructive thing that was once blocking the path. The problematic aspect to this way of progressing is that it can in itself be destructive to others. This approach was with me seven years ago, though at the time I didn’t have the language to describe it when speaking about my father and our relationship. Our relationship, like any between a parent and child, was complicated and charged with emotion. My father suffers from severe depression, but despite his mental illness I felt a sense of guilt that was impressed upon me by him. No matter how much time I spent with him and how much I tried to help it seemed to only push him further away from me and this left me an insurmountable sense of guilt. Despite my best efforts to rectify the situation whether it be financially or emotionally, at a certain point, I had to move forward with my life, and so did he. When he moved to Baltimore unexpectedly in to live an institutional environment, I felt dread and joy simultaneously. I was free of the responsibility to have to take care of him, and free to move on. Initially, we stayed in touch through email. Through those emails, we slowly let go of the relationship that we had previously had, and of the commitments that we had to one another. Without question, we still love each other, but sometimes it’s better to love someone through the past rather than in the present. Even a relationship that is connected by blood is sometimes okay to let go of. This process of letting go, when I fully surrendered to it, inevitably found its way into my work. I felt the need to be outside: to physically walk away from things. The resulting walks offered me little slices of peace. The everyday scenes, objects and situations that I encountered became charged with metaphor. At other times, the physicality of making something with my hands became a way of channeling my feelings of frustration, with the resulting documentation serving as evidence to those emotions. Reflecting on this period in my life, I have had the ability to look back and see the narrative of incremental progress that it formed. Time has created some necessary detachment from the work that was created during that period, and some feelings had been raw at the time have been lost or subdued. What is left is a complex residue that I can find happiness with. It has, and will always be complicated. In the complexity of anyone’s relationship with his or her parents, there is a right to choose how to spend time together, even if it is only in memory."- Joshua Schaedel