This Untellable Instant

  • This Untellable Instant is in conversation with my thesis manuscript, A Catalog of Instants. The installation focuses on the loss of two particular friends, and what has been created around / through / in conversation with this punctum. This work has been a cartography of sorts, moving towards the “wounderment” as Cecilia Vicuña names it, the wonder in the wound.  As observed by my mentor Jennifer S. Cheng, this carving and tracing a map–or the shape of what’s missing–has opened up a portal to meet again the ones I’ve lost.

    This work began from the realization of a personal archive; I have had a photography practice for over a decade and have taken many portraits of friends and people as they enter my life. After the second death in a year wherein I found myself sending photos of the deceased to their loved ones, I understood these portraits to now comprise a grief archive. This installation represents grief as a location you can be met in. The experience of the felt instant cannot be replicated but can be transformed, translated, transmuted. 

    Film by Rose Carr; weaving together cinematographic and auditory practices with my poetic fragments and excerpts from Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva to create a soundscape and visual environment based in intuition and slower realms of making. The use of analog methods is intrinsic to this work, utilizing both 35mm photography and hand-augmented super 8mm film. 

    This work is dedicated to anyone who has shapeshifted in the wake of loss and death, specifically those who have lost loved ones, friends, or unforgettable strangers to the synthetic opioid epidemic.

    In memory of Thi-lan Johnson and Nigeria Rami.