Re: Touch, the Arithmetics of Distance

About 8 years ago, while moving studios, some experiments with ink on film were filed, then forgotten in the shuffle. In 2020 I found them in a manila envelope and, curious to see them for the first time, sent them to be scanned. I got the scans back on March 15, 2020, a day after all NYC schools closed, and as alarming numbers of sick and dying began to roll in. I did not intentionally set out to make these images, so part of my fascination with this project has been with the strange alchemy of creativity itself - how something you begin years prior can sit patiently, like a seed, until the right moment. For this series, I am using antique photo re-touching inks and old slides from my personal photo archive. These inks are traditionally used to erase flaws that occur in analog photography - to create a “perfect” print. This process of dropping ink onto slides with a dropper is not unlike testing for pathogens on medical slides. The inks interact serendipitously with the landscape, as stains, blotches, floating vessels, imaginary interventions - each suggesting different relationships to the land; political, environmental, formal, and corporeal.