FADING LIGHT 

Archival pigment prints, LED lights, multichannel video projection

SAIC Galleries, 2023

For three months in the summer of 2022, I photographed the light that appeared above my kitchen table every evening at sunset. My marriage was ending, and my then-husband and I would sit at our table beneath this fading sunlight and painfully discuss our dissolving relationship. Mid-summer, after 13 years together, we separated. I continued to photograph this light after he left. With each passing day, the sun and earth shifted position in the sky and this light grew dimmer until one day it was gone.

While making these pictures, I experienced the time-based nature of photography — not only how time needs to pass for a photograph to be made, but how time’s passing changes the meaning of photographs and alters our relationship to them.

For my MFA thesis exhibition, I installed these photographs of light with red LED lights behind them, creating the effect of a glowing, inner light source for the photographs that dims with time as the light’s battery drains. A multichannel video projection shows overlapping videos of this same evening light fading and reemerging next to a silent video of my then-husband and I holding hands after we’d had an argument. Illuminated by the ever-changing rhythms of light, this room functions as a somatic, meditative space to embody grief and time’s passing.