How to Be Alone
BY WALL DONE, 06/07/2010
How to Be Alone is meant to be a manual for embracing the mixed feelings we find in solitude. Fear and calm, longing and satiation, loneliness and love, boredom and reverie all belong to solitude. I mostly choose natural objects and settings to preclude viewer's judgements, disrupt coherent narrative and discourage abstraction or intellectualization. Mountains made of ice, a septic-colored lake, flowers in headlights, storms on empty highways, caches of guns and piles of guts all work to form a loose and associative structure. The manual is indeed very loose, but hopefully there's enough room in both it and in solitude for all of the ready and welcome opposites I would like the viewer to embrace.
—Nicholas Hance McElroy
All images from How to Be Alone (except for image 3, from the series Brief Places ) © Nicholas Hance McElroy
