Persistence

Persistence

These artworks started out with a desire to capture a moment, a fleeting hand gesture that speaks volumes. It is something that happens briefly but is inexorably human. Instead the artworks have become about loss. Fleeting gestures exist and then do not exist. Every moment is lost to the next. Memory is all that persists. 

The photos used in these artworks also gesture toward the tension between brief and extended, the now and the past. The photos were taken on my homemade camera with exposures between 30 minutes and 2 hours. I am using the centuries-old technology of a simple lens on a box to project images onto the photographic paper. I am using cyanotype paper as negatives, which is a technology from the 1840’s. I scan the images, convert them into positives, and print them using current technology. The resulting images contain a resonant tension between the now and the past, the instant and the persistent forever.