Abandon Hope - A work in progress

“As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot. In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”
- Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Abandon Hope is a meditation on dislocation, transition, and the uneasy terrain between departure and arrival. The work follows a loosely mapped exodus from the margins of suburban life into the anonymity of mountain passes, high desert truck stops, and the scrubbed, indifferent edge of the sea.

I drive through shifting geographies: the Mojave’s relentless glare, the soft rot of forgotten neighbourhoods, the alpine silence of high sierra lakes. Along the way, I see them - strangers, drifters, and fellow seekers - each navigating their own interior exile. The portraits emerge not as documents of place, but as externalized feeling of longing, detachment, and the strange grace of solitude.

The flight from familiar demons gives way to the ambiguity of the in-between: cheap coffee and veiled vulnerabilities, barbed wire fences and roads that meet the horizon, moments of accidental tenderness pressed between the desperation of departure and the impossibility of return.

In Abandon Hope, leaving becomes its own form of arrival. To abandon hope is not to despair, but to relinquish the illusion of control - the beginning of the beginning.