THE BLUEST SKY
Residency and exhibition at Platteforum. Denver, CO. 2021
This body of work was made at Platteforum in Denver, CO in the spring of 2021. I use photography and moving images to log the atmospheric conditions of a place and peoples’ connections to the places they call home — the qualities that make a place, yet are unseen and deeply felt. In this work I try to imbue these qualities into the frame of the camera, whether that’s in the editing and sound of video or the surface of a print. I’m interested in the way the past haunts us, the soil, the long history of lands and territories, the way people remember and tell their stories. The cyanotypes are a series of “blueprints” the size of postcards. I used negatives extracted from archival photographs of Colorado from the late 1800s depicting an “empty” landscape in which colonizers and pioneers were invited to settle as they moved westward. The abstract prints are made from the chemigram and lumen process on expired silver gelatin paper. The color portraits were made in collaboration with Platteforum’s ArtLab interns — they participated in an oral history with facilitator Kendall Kultgen and I then made a portrait with them.
The ArtLab interns worked on a variety of scavenger hunts, including room diaries, videos of the clouds, sound collection, and gathering items about home, creating thoughtful and poetic reflections on perception. They also produced chemigrams, cyanotypes at Rocky Flats, a former uranium mining site that produced parts for nuclear weapons and is now a Wildlife Refuge. They sequenced and hung their prints in a way that represents the collaborative process we all engaged with. Their work and our process can be seen below.
