Tributary

2025 | Mixed Media Installation

Probably somewhere between your outer ear and the location of the voice in your head as you read this is a chamber of fluid in your inner ear known as endolymph. That liquid is crucial for your sensations of hearing, balance, and orientation. It gives you an indescribable sensation of which way is up. It tells you whether you are upright, laying on the ground, or swimming in the ocean. If the world turned upside down, you’d be the first to know.

Tributary is my exploration of stillness, turbulence, and the tension that photography creates between the two. The spark for this project was Jeff Wall’s essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” which explores how liquids used to create images are abstractly reflected in photography’s ability to capture complex, organic forms, such as liquid itself. In my work, this concept extends outward from the visual to the physical, represented not just in images but in the unique forms their prints take.

As such, Tributary has its own liquid origin, in the milk-white melted silver gelatin, or home-brewed blood-red bleach-fix bath sloshing nearly silently in its wide, shallow tray. Turbulence itself is expressed in the uncontrollable variables in my work. The steel subsurface of geography I, rusted by rainfall, acid etched, and stained with steel bluing, is one such example.

My goal is to explore this liquid turbulence through its contrasting and complimentary form, stillness. The species of stillness on display here range from the undisturbed morning air in geography II to the balanced tension of w/r/t. The moments rest between inhale and exhale. But what looks like a placid surface has a pulse underneath, waiting for the stillness to break.