LIGHT / REMAINS
2020 - ongoing

Light / Remains is a roving series of cyanotypes, poems, and essays exploring geologic and intergenerational time using light, found pigment, and found forms. The series will be published by Bored Wolves press in a forthcoming book in 2026. 

They are made in places significant to me: wild places of the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin, towns and cities in Transylvania and Poland, remote wildernesses in Alaska, archipelagos in the Arctic, canyons in the American Southwest…  

Each of these works can be thought of as an x-ray of a place, a momentary reflection of vast, ongoing temporal and spatial relations.
The primary pigment in the cyanotype process is Prussian Blue, which is made of prussic acid. Prussic acid is also part of the chemical makeup of Zyklon B, the lethal gas used to kill prisoners in Nazi death camps. “Zyklon” translates to “cyclone”; the “B” stands for Blausaure, “blue acid,” synonymous with prussic acid. Some of the death camp bunkers bear traces of the same arrestingly vibrant blue that characterizes cyanotypes.

All four of my grandparents survived death and labor camps during the Holocaust. Both of my grandmothers, Rosalie and Olga, survived Auschwitz. These paintings are a record of ongoing diaspora, trauma, and healing. They are tokens of transformation, records of attempts to shift trauma to love. They are each a prayer, a trace, an homage, an elegy.

Cyanotypes are made using a photographic process that relies upon sunlight. The sun is my primary collaborator on this project. I also collaborate with the varied animacies — pigments, stones, wings, plants, branches — that I collect in the places these images are made.

The sun and the land and the pigment and the memory of all of these things, alongside my own memories and inherited memories, made these images. They are barely-stilled transitions. Like light, they feel like they might shift at any moment.