under the light of your hand

When I was little, I used to quite often take my family photo albums out to flip through, to play. Since then, some photographs had started to mold, the monsoon damp setting off white blooms at the edges that create a cloudy vignette. Our precious storage and handling of the photos fail them as objects, yet attest to their importance. under the light of your hand explores the fallibility of archival safekeeping, whose failures track an errant form of memory that record environmental affects at the expense of the object and the subject it represents.

I source photo album sleeves and disrupt their integrity and clarity: without photos, I make the pages record themselves and their surroundings instead. A cyanotype wash reveals the layer of glue and neutralizes it into a static pattern rendered by sunlight. An abstract bulb form weaves, stutters through the sleeve as silhouette. Strokes of glossy varnish on the plastic sleeve distort and reflect the light. The photo pages mix visibility and disintegration by their own limits as technologies of memory; they illuminate the fraught practice of remembering, how we give pieces of ourselves over to the touch of a loved one and the consuming light.