FADING LIGHT (2022-2023)

For three months last summer, 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. In July, 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. I wondered if I could imbue these photographs of fading light with a sense of life and impermanence.

For my MFA thesis exhibition, I wove together these images of fading light with photographs of my body from before and after my separation. Illuminated by the rhythms of light, these photographs both mark time and move with time’s passing.

In the installation of this work, I placed LED lights behind the prints, creating the effect of a glowing, inner light source for the photographs. The project also includes a multichannel video projection: overlapping videos of this evening light fade and reemerge next to a silent video of my then-husband and I holding hands after we’d had an argument. In this video our hands are very still, occasionally punctuated by the tiniest movements of breathing and shaking, almost appearing to be a still photograph.

This installation of photographs, videos, and light shifts from moment to moment, creating a somatic, meditative space that embodies grief and time’s passing. While I began this project with my own narrative, my intention is for it to expand into a space for viewers to reflect on their own relationships with grief, impermanence, and light.

Thank you to the James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship at SAIC for supporting this work.