Tofte Lake
2023 - 2024In June 2023, I spent 2 weeks at Tofte Lake Center in Ely, MN as part of their National Emerging Artist Residency. I created a series of experimental videos, photos, and cyanotypes exploring the ways different modes of image document space and time. I played with exposure times, focal lengths, movement, and lighting. How does altering these settings change how the camera interprets the environment? How does a photo of the same object manifest differently digitally, on film, and on paper? How does an experimental approach reveal something about time, space, and the act of image-making that a traditional approach does not?
Above: Currents is 60 seconds of an infinite video loop. It contrasts the flowing, natural currents of the water with the hard edges of the digital screen via collage. Currents was installed in an exhibition at Public Functionary gallery in Minneapolis in November of 2023.
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Below: Brackish is a short essay film that examines issues of memory and image-making through various camera sources, editing, voice over, and expressionistic sound design. Edited after the residency in my home in Minneapolis, the experience of memory and recall is juxtaposed with the experience of shooting the footage.
My two weeks in-residence gave me free reign to experiment with my approach. Using both film and digital cameras, I experimented with exposure times and camera motion. This technique left me partially at the mercy of chance, but resulted in stunning photos which emphasize shape, color, and motion.
I created 90+ cyanotype prints, documenting shadows and imprints of the nature around Tofte Lake. The slow exposure process of cyanotypes and their somewhat abstract representation of their subjects contrasts with the camera captures.
Empty Space
2022Empty Space is a project that pulls from my own family’s Hi8 home video tapes to create new work. With this project I was interested in the way that cameras have been used to document memory - from early film tests, to home video cameras, to the smart phones in the digital age. It is an abstracted composition which stitches together moments from the tapes which were nearly completely indecipherable—moments of digital tape degradation, speedy pans which reduce the image to motion blur, and out-of-focus scenes. The original purpose of the videos—to document my family’s memory—is completely negated in favor of a sensorial, intangible experience. Empty Space was screened at Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis in October of 2022.
Cyanotapes
2022Cyanotypes created from stills of my family's home video tapes. Like Empty Space, this explores memory as well as the translation of images between physical, analog, and digital media. The cyanotypes represent many steps of transition—starting with the physical reality, recorded on magnetic DV tape, digitized via computer, then printed as a negative, and finally exposed on paper to create the final image (and finally finally scanned digitally again to display on this site).
LV/DV
2022The project consists of a series of 35mm double exposures taken over the course of a week in the American Southwest, specifically in Death Valley National Park and Las Vegas—two starkly different places only about 2.5 hours from each other. For these photographs, I took film photos in Death Valley, then re-loaded the same film to take photos in Las Vegas. This technique creates "double exposures" which superimposes 2 exposures on each frame. This project explores the strange tension between the remote, desolate, natural location of Death Valley and the crowded, excessive, man-made city of Las Vegas—both major attractions in the region, but for very different reasons. The photographs raise questions about humankind's impact on the natural world as well as raising questions about what we find entertaining, beautiful, and worth looking at.
Roberts Diptychs
2021Roberts Diptychs consists of cyanotypes and digital photos taken at Roberts Bird Sanctuary in Minneapolis. It examines different ways to document space and time photographically. Each cyanotype required 10-20 minutes of exposure. Once I developed them, I re-photographed the prints digitally in the same places I captured the originals. The digital photos show the contrast between the soft, white and blue cyanotypes and the actual surroundings they document—as well as the sharpness of the digital photos themselves, which only required an exposure time of 1/125 of a second.
