Jessica Alpern

This is a work in progress and images will be added as I finish them.
For many the word mirage conjures images of lost and thirsty travelers moving slowly across sun baked terrain. We consider the mirage to be an illusion of an overstressed mind, a figment of the imagination of men and women parched with thirst and being driven forward almost solely by their survival instinct. But while the mirage can create an optical illusion, the mirage image is a real image. What our eye sees and mind initially interprets as water are actually light rays from the blue sky and clouds above and ahead of us refracted so that they appear to have come from the ground.
Mirages are now known to be more common sights than most people believed a century ago, perhaps because of increasing human alteration of the landscape which favours their formation. However, mirages have had significant impacts on beliefs of cultures around the world. Many legends, spiritual visions and folk tales can be seen to have their origins in the misinterpretations of the mirage phenomena. 
This collection is named for one such illusion. In 2009 I undertook a Transatlantic crossing in two parts. The first leg of the journey from Nantucket to the Azore Islands (off the coast of Portugal) took 21 days. The second leg, which was traversed on a different boat because of damage sustained during a gale to the first, was originally supposed to take 9 days. However, due to unforeseen problems the trip took twice that long, leaving us without provisions, floating, dead in the water. This body is a look at the images our minds create when we have come to a place that no experience has prepared us for. There is a certain kind of light that I had not seen before this trip. It came shrouded in fog and from cloudless skies, but it seemed to exist only in the open ocean. It's bright in a way that makes you wonder if the rest of the world is still out there...and question the reality of things you believe to be real.