“How can I say what I know with words whose signification is multiple?” – Edmond Jabés from The Book of Questions, 1987.

“Call him, Shibboleth,/ the stranger in an alien land;/ February. No pasaran [passage forbidden].” – Paul Celan from “Shibboleth”, 1955.

My work seeks to conjure the moments that memories remember. Through deconstructing the attempted preservation of the moment, my work endeavors to allow for potentialities of quiet, wounded stories to surface, even in whisper. Calling upon the specters of captured light, my work strives to create space for possibilities of impossible justices to remain on the horizon to come, even if only spectrally. Edmond Jabés writes that after genocide, “we must write poetry but with wounded words." Derrida writes that “poetic discourse takes root in a wound.” Counter-photography stories such wounded discourse. Its roots cut through dominant memory, like a knife, with both precision and with attentiveness. Inheritance cuts through knowledge. Apparitions made of quiet stories can then link the past to the present, and the present into the future, traversing a discourse made poetic as wounds open into other wounds. My work seeks to question how eyes connect with specters from shared pasts, stories, and legacies. It seeks to chart the discontinuities that dominance invisibilizes, foregrounding negative space not as dialectical, but as kaleidoscopic ghosts of atemporal landscapes.

“Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection.  It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.”  - Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994

“Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. . . . These chance sightings, these portents, these returns, begin the unconscious connection with the subject, an unconscious connection that waits for an ordinary moment of daylight to show its face.” - Jeanette Winterson, Weight, 2005

“Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit toe the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, and right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is very place of spectrality.” – Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, 1994.

"The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized as is never seen again." - Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1968