Counting After Lightning, 2021-2024
There’s an apprehensive moment after lightning has cut across the sky, one in which the world holds still and braces itself for thunder. The flash and its sound radiate from a singular phenomenon: the lightning strike’s sudden brilliance generates a shock wave that emanates along its path, echoing as it rolls through impacted terrain. As we experience it, the two events are separated from one another, disconnected by the time between our perception of visible light and audible sound. That space—the one between an event and its effects—is one of uneasy inevitability.
Positioned between progress and collapse, Counting After Lightning investigates the complicated relationship that we have with our environment through direct references to the extractive and refining industries that power our lives. I found the presence of large-scale industrial sites in the Midwest to be profoundly affecting, and I’m interested in exploring the stark duality of what these structures signify today. Their symbolic opposition to a viable relationship with nature is dire, but their human origins and sheer scale tie them to us and how we live and work together. Even though the structures I picture play a necessary role in our lives and our potential for a more sustainable future, they ultimately reinforce an impossible status quo.
A lake that’s drying up in the Southwest. A closed down steel factory in the Midwest. My work points to the disarming awe that I find in these dispiriting realities as a means of exploring the anxiety I feel for our uncertain future. In the shadow of these subjects, I consider our relationship to our planet and what must change to make a better, more thoughtful future possible.