NORTHERN FLICKER

Multichannel digital video projection, natural light installation, and silver gelatin lumen prints

Prairie Ronde Artist Gallery, Vicksburg, MI, 2024

One day, a friend calls to tell me she is dying and wants to speak with me one last time. Earlier that morning, I’d found the dead body of a bird — an iridescent green and yellow northern flicker. After my friend and I say goodbye, I encounter more dead birds. I place silver gelatin photographic paper beneath their bodies and the surrounding plants, allowing contact and light to register their presence. At sunset, I kneel in a field of wildflowers and bury my camera in the dirt, filming petals swaying in the wind as the late summer sun shifts, wanes, and disappears.

This exhibition embodies that day: a room of drifting light and vanishing bodies, an ode to cycles of life and death. Red vinyl covers the gallery windows, filtering the setting sun into a golden circle slowly moving across the walls. Layered digital video projections submerge viewers in the wildflower field. The photographic prints of birds and plants are unfixed, remaining light-sensitive and gradually fading throughout the exhibition.