My practice is an witnessing of how film based artworks and artifacts contribute to and are transformed by the world’s suffering from ecological degradation and colonial histories. I consider Polaroid films as temporal artifacts that are uniquely susceptible to environmental shifts, functioning as witnesses to the material and social histories embedded within the landscapes they encounter.  I also engage with expired and unexpired medium format, 8mm, 16mm and digital video methods alongside the experimental instant film processes which form the bulk of my work. I place emphasis on utilizing Polaroids due to their ubiquitous nature and their ability to fix the photo without any intervention from the photographer. 

Just as Mark Stirner’s Egoism argued that individuals are impossible to fully comprehend, I contend with the notion that the earth itself is impossible to fully comprehend. As noted by John McPhee in Annals of the Former World, “the human mind may not have evolved to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.” I engage in time based explorations not to comprehend the totality of time or the temporality of environments, but to expose and chronicle the visual messaging that emanates from a place.  

The environment itself creates the images that I study in my practice. These environments have been directly impacted by climate change, and the resulting images can be considered as affects of everything that environments have endured. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters and Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I conceptualize the altered Polaroid images as “ghostly materials” that bear traces of unresolved violence—ecological, historical, and social. These haunting images demand justice rather than mere preservation, compelling us to confront the legacies of colonialism, industrial exploitation, and climate change. My work also draws on theories of Black ecologies and geographies to interrogate how media narratives shape perceptions of environmental degradation, racialized spaces, and climate justice.  

I am also seeking to theorize how these intersections are influenced by cultural techniques — processes and practices— that sustain and reproduce ecological and structural practices in order to disrupt what we think we know about environmental systems and relational ontologies. Through my work of confronting and critiquing these sufferings, I endeavor to open a third space of observing our present moment in relation to our past and future histories. The earth will survive us. I want to bear witness to the messages that the earth is leaving behind through time-based media, as it leaves us behind in the labyrinth that is deep time.