Reconstruction of Forgetting is a project that navigates the interplay between memory, history, and the potential for renewal, viewed through the lens of personal and historical legacies. Using cameraless photographic techniques, and found historical & familial objects, and video documentation of the process, the work examines the delicate balance between remembering and forgetting.

Garments such as my grandfather's shirt-owned by him in the years following his survival of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, as he later dedicated his life to peace advocacy-are soaked in developer solution and pressed directly onto photographic paper, "fixing" their presence. Their forms gradually emerge on black-and-white darkroom paper like ghostly footsteps, a transformation echoed in the accompanying video documentation. These objects, imbued with profound personal and historical significance, evoke both the fragility and persistence of memory.

Reconstruction of Forgetting bridges personal and collective memory, crafting a visual dialogue that resonates with broader historical narratives while remaining deeply intimate. By condensing these impressions into a unified space, the project invites viewers to reflect on how memory is carried, reconciled, and transformed-held in tension between permanence and impermanence.

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Reconstruction of Forgetting
2024-ongoing
Unique silver gelatin photograms (various clothes, photo developer), Wooden Frames
108 x 252 x 2.00 in.

All That the Shadows Hold was created to mark the 80th anniversary of the first nuclear weapon detonation—the Trinity Test on July 16, 1945. On the morning of July 16, 2025, I traveled to a site near the original test grounds in New Mexico, where the rising sun aligns closely with the direction of the Trinity fireball. At dawn, I unrolled 100 feet of light-sensitive photographic paper across the desert floor and exposed it to the first light of day.

The resulting sun-fused scroll—eventually rendered completely black—functions as an abstract record of exposure, duration, and erasure. By allowing sunlight to overwhelm the surface, the work echoes the original flash that inaugurated the atomic age, while refusing literal representation. The image holds no detail, only aftermath.

All That the Shadows Hold exists as a shadow monument: a gesture of remembrance shaped by absence rather than spectacle. It asks what remains after illumination, and how memory persists when images collapse under their own intensity.

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All That the Shadows Hold
2025
Scroll (light sensitive paper, sunlight), found rocks, video documentation of the performance, wooden platform
240 x 60 x 384 in.

Embodied Spectrum brings together language and image in an immersive installation. Here, I combine multiple modalities to evoke experiences, relationships, and physical phenomena that are difficult to represent in visual form. 

The installation is centered on slide reproductions of the first photographic image ever taken of the sun, flanked on either side by two poems written by me. This work evokes the unique connection between the sun and human-generated nuclear energy. In their reliance on nuclear processes, the sun and nuclear weapons are linked, although their fundamental impacts on humankind are diametrically opposed; the sun’s energy is the foundation of life on Earth, while nuclear weapons embody the possibility of its total destruction. 

Taken in 1845, the image at the center of Embodied Spectrum pre-dates the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by 100 years. By the standards of a human lifespan, these are distant events. In the span of the Earth’s history, they occur in a single epoch, a short period of drastic acceleration in both the productive and destructive capacities of humankind.

The poetic texts include references to Amaterasu, the Goddess of the Sun in Japanese mythology, and Ra, the Egyptian Sun God. These two beings reflect our relationship with the Sun throughout human history. With the creation of nuclear weapons came the dawn of a new mythology, one centered on human “mastery” of the Sun’s power. 

Embodied Spectrum begins with a singular moment of an individual life and expands out to consider the history of nations, the half-lives of nuclear fallout, and the deep time of the sun's energy. In the process, the work considers the weight of history on our most intimate relationships and the need to grapple with the human capacity for both creation and destruction. 

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Embodied Spectrum
Light Installation (Synchronized Slide Projectors, Arduino, Slide Films, Wooden Table, Steel Plates, Concrete Bricks)
Installation: 296 x 240 x 120 in.

Penumbra’s Skin is a site-specific installation set within an abandoned building in Baltimore. A slow-moving spotlight, mounted at chest height on a motorized pedestal, rotates in a straight path across the large space. Positioned in front of the beam is a thick slab of uranium glass—an early 20th-century material once prized for its luminous green glow. As the beam filters through the glass, it casts a radioactive hue across the room, illuminating fragments of the past: discarded signage, mic stands, umbrellas, a plastic flamingo, and a green hazmat suit slumped in one corner.

The light brushes across the columns, throws long shadows, and eventually lands on the viewer. Though they remain outside the installation—barred from entering—the sweeping beam makes contact, briefly touching their skin, and then their eyes, leaving a ghostly afterimage. The viewer becomes both witness and participant, marked by light.​

The uranium glass at the center of Penumbra’s Skin casts an otherworldly green hue, filtering the spotlight into something both beautiful and ominous. Once popular between the 1880s and 1920s as decorative glassware, uranium glass was admired for its uncanny glow under UV light. The slab used in this work likely originated as raw bulk material, never formed into domestic objects. After 1945, all uranium—including that used in glass production—was seized by the U.S. government, its aesthetic use eclipsed by its role in the atomic age.​

Here, that history is refracted—literally and metaphorically. The glowing glass is no longer an object of beauty or utility, but a relic of a turning point in human history: the moment uranium was transformed from household novelty to instrument of mass destruction. By positioning the viewer outside the installation, unable to intervene, Penumbra’s Skin underscores the paradox of witnessing—seeing without touching, knowing without undoing.​

The space hums with a low, unsettling drone composed of layered nuclear warning sirens. As the spotlight sweeps, it not only reveals, but implicates—creating a rhythm of dread, absence, and distorted time. The four support columns in the room offer moments of total darkness, where the light cannot reach, suggesting that some truths remain buried.​

Set only 38 miles from Washington, D.C. and within the 55 mile nuclear fallout zone, Penumbra’s Skin hovers between past and possible futures. It is both an aftermath and a warning—an irradiated mirror held up to the present, where the consequences of light, power, and silence still unfold.

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Each Tolling Sun 
2025
Site-specific installation (Theater light, uranium glass slab, slab holder, motorized base, Found objects)

Born from the Light is a photographic meditation on mutation, memory, and the many ways a single subject can be fractured across time and perspective. Consisting of 81 C-print photograms, this series was created by exposing light-sensitive paper to sunlight and the shifting shadow of a small Godzilla toy–a figure that, for me, serves as both icon and self-portrait. 

In this work, I documented the toy’s shadow from multiple perspectives, rotating and repositioning it over time. Each exposure was timed by the length of a single breath—an embodied marker of life’s fragility. The fiery red and yellow shadows contrast with black backgrounds, evoking the inverted burns left on Hiroshima’s surfaces: shadows burned into stone, memories seared into flesh.

Through this fractured grid of 81 views, the series resists the idea of a singular narrative or static memory. Even the shadows splinter and shift. The work asks: What is real? How does perspective alter truth? How do stories mutate over time? 

Linking to my project My Irradiated Friends, which also explores radiation’s lingering impact, Born from the Light examines how trauma and memory refuse containment. By turning Godzilla into a surrogate self-portrait, I reflect on the impossibility of separating victim from witness, or inheritance from identity.

Ultimately, this work is a meditation on the paradox of light itself: its power to illuminate and to destroy, to record and to erase, and to shape the shadows that carry history forward.

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Born from the Light 
Unique c-print photogram (Godzilla toy, sunlight, artist’s breath), metal frame
Installation: 102x83x1 in. (81 of 8x10 in.)

Total Sense of Absorption is a multimedia piece that resulted from a live performance on February 28th, 2023.

The performance involved me wearing a hazmat suit while holding an uranium glass bowl - a style of glass made with uranium popular during the 1950s - filled with photo developer and walking on B&W darkroom paper. During this walk, I took 452 steps and stopped every so often to re-dip my bare feet into the developer. The resulting image from these steps is a 100ft long black and white American flag. 

The number of steps correlates directly to the number of successfully cleaned up Superfund Sites - sites of contamination due to varying causes across the United States. Currently, there are 1,329 sites that still need to be cleaned. Inside of the footsteps I have scratched the date and time of the clean up of these sites as well as the ones responsible for the contamination. 

This large scale photogram highlights and celebrates the expurgation of the 452 sites and recognizes the monumental task of healing the land’s trauma. Conversely, it also draws attention to the large amount of hazardous sites that still exist - the blank areas of the flag normally where the white stripes would go gives plenty of space for more footsteps to be added serving as both a record and call to action. 

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Total Sense of Absorption 
2023
Performance using silver gelatin black and white photography paper, photo developer, disposal hazmat suit, uranium glass bowl, artist's body
42 in. x 99 ft.
 

Each Tolling Sun is a multimedia installation immersed in the legacy of nuclear tragedy and symbolism, delving into the profound impact of nuclear warfare through various artistic elements. At its core is a circular metal sheet, deliberately distorted by 108 strikes from a sledgehammer—a poignant representation echoing the symbolism found in Japanese Buddhism, where 108 signifies purification and renewal.

Surrounding this centerpiece, 108 vivid photogram prints unfold a visual journey, capturing the transformative hues of orange, red, and yellow circles against stark black or red backgrounds. These circles, mirroring the altered metal, symbolize a profound odyssey through 108 iterations, intertwining personal history with broader narratives.

This body of work draws inspiration from my grandfather's experience as a Hiroshima bombing survivor, with the sun serving as a potent symbol embodying both life and destruction. The deliberate strikes upon the metal plate manifest my palpable frustration with contemporary nuclear tensions, symbolizing a fervent call for global harmony and disarmament. The series of circles exhibited in the gallery space distill this frustration into representations of 108 suns, serving as visual echoes of my vision and mission.

The deliberate exposure of photographic paper to sunlight captures the gradual decay and transformation of the metal, aligning with the spiritual significance of the number 108. 

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Each Tolling Sun 
2023
Unique c-print photogram (hammered steel disk, sunlight artist's breath), sledge hammer, hammered steel disk, video projection with 2-channel audio.
Installation: Various ( 108 of 20 x 21 in. prints, a 8 x 35 x 3.5 in. sledge hammer, a 18 in.  diameter steel disk, and a 1 hr 36 min 39 sec video and audio