This video shows a quick look at a video Installation I made called Cell.

There is something wrong with the way we live. I believe we’re all trapped within ourselves, afraid to do what it is we truly want to do. In this society we live in, success is based on wealth. Wealth is pressed into our minds as the only means in which we can truly be happy. So we go to twelve years of schooling followed by college simply to get ahead of others in a never ending struggle to be the best. We’re taught that the only way to be successful is to have this education, so we can have a nice job, family, kids, cars, and on and on and on. We spend a good fourth of our lives doing so as well. In the end, most of us find that wealth does not equal happiness, but by that point we have no where else to go. We have no way out, so we continue that life, trapped. The way we all feel this sense of constraint differs from person to person. To some of us it simply has to do with not having the life we want, but not being able to change it. Better yet, not knowing how to change it. Some base their lives off making others happy, such as their parents, they’re told what they should be or what they should do even if it’s not what they themselves want.This can be related to a career path, education, or even who is the right person for them to be with. It then becomes a choice of their happiness versus the happiness of those other people controlling their life. Some manage to work up the courage to follow their own dreams, many don’t. There are various ways one can feel this suffocation, this feeling of total hopelessness, and so I want to know other peoples stories. I want to share them as well as my own in this project.

I see my own future and looks rather grim. My parents tell me it’s just life, that we all just have to accept it, but I believe that’s the problem. We all just give up and accept the way we live saying at least I’m better off than these people. I watch myself trapped in this box unable to move, slowly suffocating, and there is nothing I can do about it.

We often deal with this feeling by having comforts that help with the sense of hopelessness, but in the end they do nothing to fix the problem, they just numb the pain for a while. These comforts can be anything from food to someone you love and in the project they will be represented by the white chair you see in the screen shot below.

I don’t know how to fix this problem, if I did, I most likely wouldn’t be here. However, I do believe by making this it will allow more people to realize they’re not alone. Perhaps when they do, one of them will know a way to fix the problem.