- Figure 01 -
aerial apparition phenomenon / recorded wave transmissions
- Figure 02 -
visitor / further wave phenomenon
- Figure 03 -
curtain simulation memory / day
- Figure 04 -
indivisible universe diagram
- Figure 05 -
documented mercury tree
- Figure 06 -
final visit
october 10, 2022 - 1:27 am
Suspended to the northeast of my apartment is a thick sheet of cloud saturated in an ill-lit, oppressive orange light. During those apocalyptic months of the pandemic when the fires were at their worst, I would see this aurora approach me as I drove home and assume it to be some distant inferno. Eventually the flames died out and the ash was wiped from my windowsill, but the light still lingered. In the late evenings, I’d stand outside my car and watch it cast its reach over the eastern hills. It did not move, but hung silently, interrupted only by the descending tone of passing vehicles. I became fascinated with a nearby tree that silhouetted itself against this murderous orange sky, the leaves of its great branches harshly revealed by a streetlight bent over in its inspection. I was almost afraid as the landscape watched me.
I remembered as a kid when I had to walk out into the night to dump the trash out at the far end of my street— the urgency that compelled me to hurry my task. As I’d turn home, an irrational idea of Dark overwhelmed me, igniting a primitive fear that lay deep beneath the foundations of my modern mind. I felt an intense movement of malevolence emanating from its blackness, trailing behind me, chasing me, its many arms extended to grasp my body.
If I stood by my car and stared too long at this tree and the sky beyond it, I felt much the same.
At my age, I think less of my own loneliness at night. I wonder if I should be more afraid. To my younger self, I must seem very brave for sleeping alone, left to deal in isolation with the nightmares that wake me and figures that stand at the far corners of my room. Entirely separate from those childhood fears, I hold a renewed paranoia of the night from the trauma of my previous assault at the train station, but it competes with an intense curiosity to explore and photograph new dark corners. I wander about the suburban streets on foot, sometimes driving, but always feeling this strange contradiction: that I am both afraid of being attacked and that I am myself a figure of suspicion.
I eventually discovered that the strange light originated from a nearby neighborhood, which had planted a multitude of eerie street lamps that sat tall above the sidewalks, nestled in trees, casting an eternal, sickly yellow-orange glow that clung to every surface. This plague of hue was hidden in plain view, and only when the clouds gathered low in the hills could it be projected onto the sky. I was afraid of visiting this neighborhood because of the people I might encounter and because I was a stranger. When I did, I felt myself being watched.
These images are mostly of the light as I saw it from my home. It still watches me now and then. It has reached an almost literary status in my mind as the perfected metaphor—an anxiety captured in this concentrated location, manifested in physical form as a radiating light.
I extend this metaphor to these photographs, many of which are laden with noise due to the low lighting of the scene. In these extreme exposures, the curvature of the camera’s lens is almost visible, creating waves that disseminate from a central point of the frame. I did what I could to manipulate and exaggerate these features in what is admittedly a retread in aesthetics. It’s been about eight years since I was first interested in documenting the suburbs at night. At this point, it is undoubtedly a permanent fixture in my art.
