№ 1–2:

To Be a Pale Copy
Dye sublimation prints on polyester
Each: 3 x 5 feet (0.9 x 1.5 meters)
2017

№ 3:

You Are a Pale Copy
Wall installation with titanium dioxide pigment and linseed oil
Dimensions variable
2018

These photographic prints are of Berenice Abbott’s images. Originally taken for physics textbook studies of wave interference patterns, they show light passing through water. Repurposed as fabric banners, the work emphasizes Abbott’s iconic compositions with bands of light and shadow and geometric forms.

Previously, Abbott had worked in Man Ray’s Paris photo studio and subsequently opened her own business taking portraits of interwar Paris’s artistic and social avant-garde. As one of the major chroniclers of the flourishing scene in Montparnasse, she captured evocative likenesses of those at the forefront of the movements of Surrealism, Dada, and modernist literature. Many of these artists were exploring the subconscious mind, the shell shock of World War I, and the potential for new ways of seeing and making images.

How, within the language of physics, is the construction of identity and society represented through cloaking, reinforcement, or interference patterns?

Abbott is quoted stating that imitation reduces us to the status of a faded reproduction: a “pale copy.” In You Are a Pale Copy, I inscribe this phrase on the surface of a painted white wall using a subtly different white oil paint, considering the ambiguous and inevitable nature of this outcome: one constantly reiterates the past, producing echoes and copies of what came before. The oil paint is handmade from linseed oil and titanium dioxide, one of the molecular mineral elements identified in the dusty nebula of stars.

Installed at R/SF Projects, San Francisco, California.