Bard MFA Thesis, 2022
Red Hook, NY

bewilderingly of light in shadowy places visualizes inaccessible layers of history to propose the under-visible as a limitless terrain. The work moves beyond traditional structures of the photographic to create an alternate imagistic space. The physical points to the necessity of the ethereal in possible ways of seeing.

This work illuminates socio-political interweavings of embodiment of the personal and the familial with fragmented archives to create a site of inquiry. In “a cloud’s slow blinking eye draws in the earth”, red clay from the artist’s childhood home in Maryland cracks and fissures, slowly un-forming to reform under drips of water from a translucent sculpture suspended above the clay. The work detaches the image from photography and returns image-making to the elemental, here the process of growing latent seeds in dirt shows the relationship between image-making and personal becoming.

Within weeks of watering, the reconstituted clay sprouted seedlings embedded by wind, animal, or chance; articulating the possibility of something new after reaching a seemingly exhausted state.

“In night too is also a sun”—a neon of a lunar eclipse—both light and dark hold the capacity for concealment as they do illumination. The possibility of imagining past limits is furthered in the use of diffused light.

bewilderingly of light in shadowy places creates a fever dream where illumination is buried within illumination. It pretends at clarity and leaves one at a threshold of perception.