From May 18 to June 15, 2016, I was in residence at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. Located in a remote, beautiful landscape in the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Fransisco, the program has an old barn on the property which is made available to artists for the purpose of creating intallations. The Old Barn is a transcententally beautiful site: it is a wooden structure in an advanced state of disrepair which has been structurally reinforced with a poured concrete floor and an internal, steel support system. When the roof was replaced, selected shingles were removed and clear acrylic panels were installed in their stead, preserving the way the sunlight entered through the holes in the previous, worn out roof. For me, the site has the solemnity and luminosity I assocate with cathedrals. For "Eclipse", I leveraged that solemnity to initiate the creation of a kind of memorial for victims of police violence.

I had taken the train West from my home in Chicago to San Fransisco for the residency. While I recorded the journey with still images and video, I wondered to myself what I wasn't seeing. The victims whose names are included in this piece died in the cities and towns located along the "California Zephyr" route. Working backwards from the date of June 6, 2016, and stopping when I got to 116 names (one for each hole in the ceiling of the Old Barn), I got as far back in time as August 2014. The names of victims who'd died in or closer to Chicago were installed closer to the East part of the structure, while the names of those who died closer to or in San Fransisco were installed closer to the West. Each name is installed such that it obscures all or part of the light that would otherwise come in through that ceiling perforation.

Accountability for police violence is rare, which is why it is of interest to note this piece is bookended by two such instances: Laquan McDonald's death at the hands of police in October of 2014 ultimately led to the removal of the Chief of Police Garry McCarthy in Chicago. Similarly, the death of Jessica Williams Nelson in San Fransisco while I was in residence at the Djerassi program (she died on May 19, 2016) led to the resignation of San Fransisco Chief of Police Greg Suhr.

Of 116 names, I managed to install 58 while in residence. I plan to return to the site later this year to complete the installation, which will feature a painted sunlight floor component and a video projection in addition to the names themselves.

The full moon that crossed the sky overnight from July 31, 2015 to August 1 was technically “blue” because it was the second full moon in a calendar month. In the color I observed as the moonlight landed on the white walls and oak floor of the Riverside Art Center, however, I was surprised to note a distinct, warm yellow-gold cast. In contrast, the white walls took on a distinctly bluish tone beyond the angled polygons of light, which entered through a large, south-facing picture window, a smaller window on a curved wall that faces east, and the open door of the gallery, that also faces south. “Crescent”, the site specific installation in the main space of the gallery, shows the moonlight as it entered the space at 9:20 PM, and then at about every half hour thereafter, crossing the space in an elegant arc before setting at 5:30 AM. The title comes not from the phase of the moon but from the cumulative shape formed by tracking it’s entire transit across the space in spray paint.

I’m more accustomed to tracking daylight- cold in temperature except during sunrise, sunset, and certain atmospheric conditions. A month-long residency at the RAC gave me the opportunity to consider the moonlight- the main, generous, luminous “actor” in a space also influenced by two other significant experiential factors: the nearby train tracks and the Des Plaines river. In response to these, I created a two channel video installation that was projected along the baseboards of two adjacent walls in the smaller, north gallery of the art center.

To create the first one, a cell phone camera was pointed at the train tracks seen from the vantage point of the BNSF commuter train from downtown Union Station to Riverside. Video clips that were each one minute in length, but which were shot at different times of day, were placed in chronological order side by side to create a long, horizontal projected video. For the second one, an HD video camera was pointed down at the Des Plaines river for a minute at a time during each hour of daylight, from the vantage point of a pedestrian bridge that crosses the river one block from the Riverside Art Center. These clips were then set side by side in chronological order to offer viewers the experience of every hour of daylight at once on the Des Plaines river. The two-channel piece is titled “To and From”.

Finally, and also in the smaller gallery alongside “To and From”, I recreated the sunlight from 7:00 PM and 7:15 PM as it entered the gallery at sunset, filtered through the leaves of the trees from the back garden space. This piece was titled “Last Light”.

My project as an artist centers around arresting movement- I attempt to apprehend the ephemeral, to hold things in place and make them concrete and material so that what is fleeting can be examined more closely. In "Synopsis" (a site-specific work created for "Invisible", a group exhibition at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery) I turn the lens on myself, asking what it means to try to apprehend light, and looking at the performance of that action: over a sequence of 76 photographs, each projected for 1.5 seconds, I am seen aligning a white sheet along the contours of the sunlight landing on the floor, then settling in for a nap. As the sun moves and I get cold, I get up, realign my sheet to the new sunlight position, and attempt to settle in again. Spray-painted sunlight shapes on the floor of the installation appeared to come from a set of double doors in the gallery; each projected image aligned with one of the spray-painted sunlight shapes on the floor before moving off-register to align with the next one.

What would it look like if you could see all of the separate times the sunlight pours into a space at once- the entire "sweep" of the sun's motion through a space in a day? This site‐specific installation for the "SpotLight" exhibition at the Elmhurst Art Museum documented 7 separate instances of the sun entering the space on a particular day in late autumn/ early winter. Based on photographs and careful spatial surveys conducted on November 15, 2013, Sunrise, 8:30 AM, 9:30 AM, Solar Noon (11:38 AM at the time), 1:30 PM, 3:30 PM, and 4:30 PM (the latest time sunlight was visible on the wall, closest to sunset) were spray‐painted in translucent colored layers matched to the color temperature of the light at that time of day.

Patterns made by the sun as it was observed entering the site at 7:45 AM every two weeks were recorded onto the wall in spray paint. Foreseen as a permanent installation for HairPin, the piece currently represents February through May, at which point the sun moved too far North to touch the walls. Additional sunlight times will be recorded beginning in late August, once the sun has moved South again.

The title of this piece was inspired by Carol Becker's 2009 book, "Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production". Located on the East side of Broadway, Carol's office gets sunlight from both the South and the West. This intervention replicates a long day in August, using a shifting pallette of custom-mixed, blue to pink spray paint to track the movement of the sun through the space every half hour.

Two talented and significant friends were leaving the city of Chicago for other locales. In order to "fix" Sumakshi and Gisela in space and time, I painted both the space and the ladies themselves to correspond to the daylight entering Western Exhibition Gallery's project space at 2:30 in the afternoon on a December day.