Alive A Life A light, 2025
Expanded cinema slide show performance
Chesna family archive
An aging couple in the Chicago suburbs give away their personal archive of family photographs to a stranger, discarding of hundreds of slide film photographs from the 1950s and 60s. The photographs are strange, tender, silly, mysterious, poetic, and they feel very much alive.
I bring this archive to life in a slide-show performance, asking: Why do we photograph our lives? Are photographs alive? If so, what is the lifespan of a photograph, of an archive?
These questions form the thread of an accompanying poetic essay. I photograph my writing, print it on transparency, and turn it into slides – allowing myself, and my questions, to both respond to and physically enter the archive.