Face Your Shit, Heal Yourself: Augmented Reality Art, Healing Endometriosis & the Path of True Freedom

Every day, 24 hours, 365 days a year.

For the most part, the world lives on a 24-hour clock.

You may have heard of a sketch a day or other everyday projects like the crypto art record-breaking sale of Beeple's Everydays, in which Beeple created an image from start to finish every day for thirteen years. We look at completeness in terms of the 24-hour circadian clock--the man's clock. Testosterone is highest in the morning--notice how we begin work around 9:00 a.m.--and then begins to drop off in the evening around 5:00 p.m. Hence, the 9-to-5 workday.

Now, nothing against the male biological clock, but the timing of our world is run in a way that's pretty one-sided, benefiting testosterone, and men have done a great job at leveraging and optimizing their biology. Essentially, society is run by a short-circuit battery (the 24-hour male clock) compared to a long-circuit battery (the 28-day female clock), neither one being better, just different. Within the less familiar infradian rhythm clock (your monthly cycle) for women, completeness lies within every phase, a 28-day series of 4 phases that cyclically repeats: Follicular, Ovulatory, Luteal, and Menstrual. Similar to the cycles of the seasons and the earth, very few things in nature repeat the same thing every day.

The contrast of these ideas, which I learned about in my quest for answers in healing my debilitating endometriosis pain became the inspiration for my Every Phase series, which I began in April 2021. The series is focused on how I healed myself with the lesser-known female infradian rhythm 28-day clock in contrast to the masculine, 24-hour clock or every day lifestyle. So just like Beeple's record-breaking NFT project, Everydays: The First 5000 Days--I decided to create a piece of art from start to completion, not every day, but every phase that will continue for the next thirteen years (approximately five-thousand days). I named the series 'Every Phase' with the accompanying art of each phase metaphorically illustrating the different brain and body chemistry of what's occurring during that particular phase.

Face Your Shit, Heal Yourself is an AR-interactive art book that illustrates my journey of healing by looking at the things no one (including you) really wants to see. Augmented Reality (AR) interaction allows for the marriage of both the physical & digital worlds, enabling the artwork to be experienced in more than one format. This first book captures the first year of the series, from April 2021 to December 2021, and consists of 6 cycles, or 24 phases. I have also created an accompanying podcast launching in Fall 2022 (same title as the book) to help other women dealing with 'chronic' pain and hormonal imbalances by introducing some of the experts and practices that helped me achieve what I thought was impossible.

A true explorer and creative, Atlanta artist Meredith Ochoa began her visual arts journey in 2006 at 17 years old, after being a ballerina for 14 years, coming out of an eating disorder, and becoming fascinated with light and shadow- how one can only see the light because of the shadow and vice versa. This contrast showed up not only in her photography but in her life.

She started making her own pinhole cameras and began exploring the alchemy of the darkroom, so when she received a miraculous scholarship to SCAD, she was pretty upset about the digital 'takeover' within the photo world.

She decided to make a 'mockery' of digital photography--turning a scanner into a sort of 'large format' camera. This became an entire practice & technique within itself, and became the scanning process that she is known for today. The subject becomes the negative describing the subject digitally with a flattened focal plane.

This technique is depicted throughout her work and was the artistic beginning of her realization that all healing starts with being authentic. She describes her work with the statement...

Through my art I am healed, and I heal others.