Kodak and the Comet, 2018-ongoing
Sourced from my personal archive of exposed film negatives, Kodak and the Comet presents modified and effaced images of Detroit from 2006 and prior in the context of the city’s current day "revival.” Employing a corrosive technique that uses a variety of household cleaning products, I irreversibly alter the color emulsions of the film. Through several rounds of this process, the original photographs become surreal and abstracted.
Depictions of the Detroit landscape shift from foreground to background as their details are obscured by color fields and splotches, at once complicating the notion of photography as a record of time and of history on both a personal and civic scale. By creating a sense of strangeness from familiar representations of Detroit’s landscape, I attempt to visualize the complications, hemorrhages, and erasures that emerge from the city’s ever-shifting physical, economic, and social landscape. The final images in Kodak and the Comet are produced on a large scale and exhibited in wall-sized installations, referencing abstract expressionist painting with the goal of creating an immersive viewing experience.