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Watching someone watching the river

2020-21, mesh photobanner installation series with wooden armature, 5’¾” x 3’½” x 3’½”

Over the course of the pandemic, I regularly documented the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers at sites that were chosen both for their proximity along my daily walking routes and for their layered human ecological significance. I erected temporary sculptural installations of selected photographs back at the riverfronts as a way to transpose image against site and to consider what landscape photography may become if it’s allowed to shift into an object. These image-objects are moments suspended and caught in the flow of seasons, sickness, protest, change.


What is a sign when you take away its instruction, even its symbols? Is it an empty frame? The banners interpose landscape as sign, as temporary human constructions. In treating the images as banners, I respond to the proliferation of signage that was placed at the city’s waterfront during the beginning of the pandemic. These signs warned the public to maintain a space of 6 feet between one another.


In one image, my shadow stretches across the park. My little dog, Sula, is beside me. My fastest companion. In the distance, people stroll by or sit awhile and watch the rivers pass. I think of Hélène Cixous’s writing and her testament that the eye has hands of its own, hands that also yearn to reach out and touch. How badly I wanted the company of a stranger.

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