Remuda Ranch

Remuda Ranch is an attempt to turn the past on its head by reimagining the two months I spent as a teenager in a Christian eating disorder facility, where my body, my story, and my sense of self were placed under religious and medical control.

At seventeen, I spent two months at a Christian eating disorder treatment facility in Wickenburg, Arizona. During our time there, we were allowed disposable cameras, one of the few ordinary teenage activities permitted. I photographed my friends and daily life around the ranch. Stripped of context, the images resemble typical adolescent snapshots: girls resting, smiling, passing time together. They reveal little of the psychological intensity of the environment or the fears many of us carried there.

The project brings these archival snapshots into dialogue with personal and institutional remnants from that time, including a letter from my younger brother and a certificate of “achievement” issued by the facility with a biblical quotation beneath it. Alongside them are staged color photographs built from fragments of memory, composite figures, and heightened psychological states rather than direct reenactment. Using theatrical lighting and constructed scenes, the new work moves between quiet observation and a more unsettled, symbolic register.

The girls in the photographs are amalgamations rather than portraits of the individuals I knew. Certain images echo specific recollections: a girl’s self-inflicted markings glimpsed during chapel, another convulsing during a moment of psychosis, the white cotton gloves I was given when I bit my nails until they bled. Others depart from literal memory to evoke the confusion I felt as religious belief, institutional authority, and adolescent vulnerability became entangled.

By combining archival fragments with the slippage of staged photographs, the project further distorts the reflection of what the past was, how it was perceived, and the distance between the surface of an experience and its psychic afterlife. The work, still in progress, is a way of returning to that past with the control I did not have then, and of reaching back toward a former self with the knowledge that I lived.