Night Lights

Night Lights is an extension of How lucky we were to have lived, and is an ongoing project that opens spaces of healing and understanding for me, breaking my family’s generational cycles of divorce, abandonment, and loss in order to imagine a better future, and honor family members that are gone but perhaps misunderstood. Growing up in a family fractured by broken homes and early deaths, I see my feeling of displacement within my family history echoed in a larger, growing feeling of detachment within American society. Technically, Night Lights combines digital and analog processes by re-photographing projections of found slides and snapshots with medium format color film. ​ 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.