My mom had a red mini van when I was five. One morning I placed my sticky left hand onto the side of the sliding doors where it gathered dust. It must have cemented itself because I studied this mark for years in those dull moments of impatience before the door opened. As I aged, I compared my growing hand to the size of the mark. When she sold the car without consulting me, I wept for my handprint friend. My gaze is still caught by moments of absence — cat-claw scratches in our banister, the worn steps of a cathedral, the compacted earth of a well-loved path. A visual absence whispers of previous presence. 

Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty claims that the hallmark of the visible is to have a “lining of invisibility… which it makes present as a certain absence.” Light, color, and reflections are intangible; they bathe our world of objects. Light slides over a pane of glass and bounces off again before slipping away with the turn of the earth. These moments are silent. They do not scream for our attention as physical objects might, rather, they shimmer quietly around and behind.

Attending to these silent moments draws out a presence. What emerges is a visual lexicon - shadows, marks, and light become words hiding in plain sight. Using mirrors, screens, illumination, and video, my goal is to index and suspend these words into a poetry of sorts. The audience is invited to gaze into the invisible lining.