Contemporary Photographic Practice and the Archive

A project with the collective Lakes Were Rivers in which we individually did research at the Harry Ransom Center for a year, culling objects from their collection and making work in response.

I wrote the following about my project for the museum walls:
My work is an investigation of the experiences we have in the ecstatic, evolving universe—a range of elements reflective of a larger sensibility of perceiving and experiencing the world. I began my research with sight, inspired by the sun as a life source and metaphor for perceiving connections between things. My research on light and optics in the John Herschel papers and with the William Sacar stereo slides evolved into my own creation, a lightbox and object inspired by the phenomena of a 360-degree rainbow around the sun, known as a snowdog.

Exploration of the perceptual world led to an investigation of visible and invisible patterns and mimicry. I paired Elsa de Brun’s pastel painting of sacred geometry and William Blake’s hand-colored etching of Urizen, god of reason and law, with a nearly perfectly symmetrical leaf I found and a word drawing I made outlining a day in my life in which a series of events uncannily aligned.

Reflections on the everyday brought me to the idealized views of Henry Peach Robinson, expressed through photography, drawing, and collage, as well as the words constructed by William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings in joyous acknowledgement of life’s daily experiences, big and small. Their works inspired my own album of photographs, collaged with layers of paper and text, mirroring the pieced together and overlapping poetics of life.

A review of the exhibition from the Austin American Statesman is here.