The Dark Hours

The Dark Hours Sitting under the gnarled branches of a large mesquite, I watch the sliver of a waxing moon dip low on the horizon. A summer storm has forced pause in my work. First the wind and dust turn the tarped walls of my impromptu darkroom into a billowing creature punctuated with the light and smoke of my fiery exposures. Now the rain with large inconsistent drops pulls dust from the sky creating crowns of mud on the surface of my paper. These storms appear with violent certainty and dissipate into swift quiet silence. A cycle of the summer I have come to love. This summer I worked through multiple projects and my production was driven by cycles of weather and the moon. I waited for the dark hours when the moon was low or small in the sky and the suns reflective gaze reduced to darkness. I toiled through storms in these precious hours through the summer solstice. My conspirator, a night blooming Cereus grown from cuttings I have carried from my childhood home, shared my productive cycle, awaiting the dark hours to explode. The Cereus’s great white blossoms, open once at night during the hot months of the summer, only to close with the rising sun the following morning. This bloom has always been sign of the warm nights and exhaustion of summer, bringing memory of a neighbor a, a monumental figure who’s yard glowed with the fragrant white explosion in the light of the growing moon. This work, which started as an exploration pulling at the base elements of photographic medium, evolved to explore energy, fluid, motion, light, chaos, reactive materials and violence. The work in this exhibition follows this line but it is a reprieve from many of these endeavors, offering a move toward meditative simplicity. Seduced by the reduction of fire and chaos into a single line, a delineation, a separation and horizon that resonates with desert landscape, the storms that give pause and the western states that are on fire. This single line disrupting the traditional flat surface of the paper, pulling attention to its creation while opening the possibility of discovery through suggestion of depth. I followed these images, night after night repeating, refining, small explosions, meditating on a single evolving line until the suns reflection on the moon was too bright to work. As shadows grew around me I could once again sit back and enjoy the explosion of white in my conspirators' blossoms and wait for the moon to wane into darkness.