Trace

Trace consists of a 16’ wide, and 5’ high quilt of black and white prints on translucent organdy fabric. Some of these squares have prints of hands pointing, tracing, scratching and touching. Some have just painterly marks from monotype prints. The work looks like a transparent quilt hovering in midair, suspended in motion with wire hanging from the ceiling. It is frozen in an undulating, diagonal line in space with the help of wire within the seams. When the viewers walk into the space they cannot avoid casting a shadow on this surface. By making the shadows of the viewer a condition of experiencing the work and by using a video of shadows, I evoke an uncanny feeling of appearance and disappearance that confuses the viewer’s perception of reality. 

The duality of static prints and moving images was something I wanted to explore with Trace. The prints of hands evoke a haptic  sense but denies gratification of touch at the same time. The images disappear on the wall and we are left with a feeling of loss, a distance between a need to touch and a failure to be able to. This is often how I feel about my own memories, like searching in the dark and never really grasping a complete notion of what things may have been like. Names and faces of people who weave in and out of our lives have evaporated and memories of places I have been to merge into one another. Only shadows of these things remain as traces of what changed me in some way through these events, places and people.