Borrowed Time

Borrowed Time tries to fill in the gaps of my late father’s life. Creating multiple exposures with my own family photos combined with a lot of anonymous film purchased online, I can give my dad back the years he lost, having passed in his late 50s. I can also fill in the time that we didn’t spend together when he was alive, the stories I never heard and the experiences we didn’t have. We weren’t close, and we’ll never have the chance to be, except through imagined memories. ​ Responding to an established vocabulary of vernacular images that live in a certain space of our collective subconscious (the slides I buy from eBay are mostly from the 1950s-1980s), the comforting nostalgia of happy women, children, and families nevertheless betray an underlying uneasiness and cynicism. Working with the slide images is an interactive experience. I choose subjects from the slides, digitally scan them, and then through projection I invite them in to domestic interiors as stand-ins for my own family. I pass the image between digital and analog processes, and in and out of the past and the present. In some cases they function as proxy self-portraits, and in more recent iterations I even pose myself alongside them in the frame. As this project progresses, I’ve moved on from something akin to listening to retellings of family stories, to acting them out, to re-imagining different futures. ​ A version of Night Lights was chosen for the 2022 Review Santa Fe and was a finalist for Photolucida's Critical Mass in 2023.