grains

I am thinking about a wind taking the place of my soul, and my soul liberated floating towards the cloud to melt around the sun.

I know about a dance that my wind-full body does between the daily rains, avoiding the drops falling wetly on the lake.

We are the same, me and you, you and me, same height, same eyes, same heart beat — both on the same side, almost alike, sky. Same love, and pain, mostly unfulfilled, mostly pain, drenched.

The lake then does its trick: grains and shines, splits and seeds, whirls and beats; bits and shadows, tears and scars, mine. You, adding to my equation.

grains is a series of underwater photographs of the artist’s own body, made at macro range beneath the surface of the lake, in near-total darkness. Shot and then inverted, the images are tonal negatives: what was black becomes a field of light, and the body surfaces out of it as a pale, grain-built apparition. The grain is the trace of photographing blind, of reaching for an image where there was almost nothing to expose; inverted, that darkness becomes the luminous water the body seems to float in. A shoulder becomes a ridge of light, a back a slope of particulate, and the figure hovers between flesh and water and pure grain — the viewer never quite certain where the body ends and the lake begins.

The images are printed on habotai silk thin enough to be nearly transparent, then hung from the ceiling on near-invisible line. Freed from the wall, each photograph drapes and moves with the air of the room — the body returned to a suspending medium, the silk standing in for the water it was made in. In the gallery the panels hang at the height of a body, so that visitors move among them as the body moved through the lake.