Bind us together

Aaron Lelito

 Image description: A hazy blue background,  bare branches taking up the bottom half of the image.  The branches are scraggly and have red berries visible.  Handwritten text coming in at the upper  left side of the image reads,  Lean Years, Geography Around Roses.  Would it bind us together in a different life?  The hollow guides through graceless gambles dissolvable and going nowhere. Invisible and dormant,  the other life, the world silent.  Where we are people take up space, we weren't like that.  Even you could not know,  feeling thin.  Hold everything, listen,  papers of innocent admiration.  Now there's a thick fog,  now different names.  An underwater safety, just a veil, selfless way of sheltering.

Artist Statement: In my photography and digital art, I am primarily drawn to the patterns and imagery of nature. This subject matter has become a way for me to reflect on the larger themes of environment, climate, and ecology. Along with this macro view, however, there is the micro—my personal relationship with nature and the world around me. There are restorative, therapeutic, and transcendent aspects of interacting with the waves, flowing water, leaves, and branches. To me, these simple patterns have a deep resonance with the transformations that are a part of the human condition.

I often engage with these fundamental shapes and patterns because I tend to see creative potential in these images, not only in the narrative sense of “telling a story,” but in their ability to express what often lays dormant in our everyday lives, a vision of what remains unseen by a passing view.

The image “Bind Us Together” combines a photo and text from my notebook. When I use my notebook pages in photos, I tend to keep the decision-making of which visual image to pair with each page somewhat loose, leaving room for intuition to take hold. It is important for me to honor the words on the page, while also allowing for some areas of the text to recede into the background and other areas to stand out. The layering of these elements is something special to me—it’s a place of intimacy, where natural imagery collides with words plucked from my daily surroundings, impromptu lists, partial sketches, inner thoughts, and cross-outs.

Aaron Lelito is a visual artist and writer from Buffalo, NY. His poetry chapbook, The Half Turn, was published in 2023, and he released a collaborative notebook/art collection titled If We: Connections Through Creative Process in 2024. His work has also appeared in Stonecoast Review, Barzakh Magazine, Novus Literary Arts Journal, SPECTRA Poets, Peach Mag, and Santa Fe Review. He is Editor in Chief of Wild Roof Journal.