THE DUST THAT MADE YOU

Handmade risograph-printed artist book and paper sculpture, 2022

Photographs made between 2016 and 2020, prose written in 2020

6 x 9 x 0.5, folds out to 60 x 36 inches

In the rupture and fear of the early pandemic days, I felt a rift in my psychological sense of time and space. I had the sensation that all my memories up to that point were collapsed into one time period — a solid wall of then before now. I was living in Los Angeles and walked daily to the LaBrea Tar Pits, an active archaeological site in the middle of the city. The park has small lakes of bubbling tar where, over millennia, animals fell into the tar and were swallowed whole. These pits are like geologic black holes, as the fossils of creatures who walked the earth tens of thousands of years apart are discovered right next to each other, their bones entangled and perfectly preserved in this collapsing of time and space. Each day, I would walk around the bubbling tar pits and think about eternality, time, death, bodies, and secrets. This book is a collection of the prose I wrote during these visits to the tar pits, and the photographs I'd made from road trips in the southwestern desert over the years leading up to the pandemic. An exhumation of past lives and an obfuscated present, reaching for one other.