Borrowing from the tradition of fanfiction, the works in The Wait is Long, My Dream of You Does Not End illustrate a fictional relationship with an imagined lover, from initial attraction to eventual heartbreak. I draw upon the aesthetic of online fan communities, blurring the lines between reality, fantasy, and popular culture. Can an invented love interest be more than just an inverse of myself, a strange twin flame with negative space indentations of everything that I am? In fanfiction, many conflicting realities can exist simultaneously. This is especially true when a fan author writes themselves into the narrative, a trope known as a “self-insert” wherein the author creates an avatar of themselves to be included in the story’s world as a significant character. In this work, I illustrate the relationship between myself and Tim “Speed” Speedle, a character from the 2002 police procedural drama CSI: Miami. Speed was a Crime Scene Investigator and series regular from the show’s pilot until his character was killed in a jewellery store shootout in the Season 3 premiere, Lost Son. In my story, cobbled together from personal life experiences, television plotlines, and my imagination, Speed’s CSI tech character acts as a stand-in for multiple real love interests of mine, past and present, rolled up into one supercrush. Though my physical likeness is not rendered in any of these drawings, I am hyper-present in the story as its perpetually lamenting narrator. Just as a fan defines themselves in relation to the figure at the centre of their fandom, I paint an intimate portrait of myself through my public adoration of another. 

Using drawing, installation, video, and poetry as my primary mediums, I produce physical documents as evidence of a star-crossed romance, spanning the course of several years. My graphite and coloured pencil drawings feature a range of references, including text from a diary entry, early 2000s stock photos, a Lizzie McGuire .gif, and several Google-sourced images of CSI’s Tim Speedle, as portrayed by actor Rory Cochrane. I stitch these together through diligent scratching of pencil on paper, forming a storyboard-esque timeline of events, using the visual logic of a dream. In my work, my vulnerability lies in how deeply and openly I contemplate things that on the surface may appear silly or shallow. I use a methodology that involves taking what is typically seen as a frivolous or light-hearted idea very, very seriously, and pushing it to iterative conclusions through my work. To me, a crush is like a personal celebrity, a subject of consuming devotion, yearning, speculation, desire and joy. Someone to perform a presentation of self for, in hopes of being perceived and validated through attention, real or imagined. The paradoxical byproduct of these exuberant, though often futile, efforts is a kind of introspection and a formation of selfhood, independent of a love interest. Through a laborious image-making process, I assert agency over what could otherwise be a very passive state of media absorption. I take things I enjoy: dating shows, online fandom, fantasies of love, genuinely and at face value—claiming them in my own internal world-building.