In Blueprints: Concerning Legibility, I use cyanotype to explore documentation, architectural history, and the elusive (and illusive) legibility of everyday life. Cyanotypes seem to “capture” evidence like photographs, but they are also made through contact: the physical relationship between object and surface becomes part of how the image gets made. They are also blueprints, tied to the architectural technologies that helped reproduce drawings during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when much of the current built environment was being imagined and constructed.
I am interested in the hollowness of architectural blueprints as cultural documents. They describe space, but not lived experience. They record walls, measurements, and plans, but not the ordinary lives that unfold within them. Historically, many of these plans were drawn by white middle-class men, who represented only a portion of the people who would inhabit those spaces.
Begun in 2020, this project asks how blueprints might be used to tell stories about the everyday and the mundane. I began saving the shell from the egg I ate each morning and cyanotyping one eggshell per day as a kind of calendar entry. Each shell became a small vessel for expression about one day’s everydayness.Using seeds, plant material, rusty nails, food particles, styrofoam, cat whiskers, dust, houseplant soil, lint, and threads from my clothing, I documented the flotsam and detritus of daily life. These fragile shells — things we toss into the compost without a thought — evoke discard, transience, and the minor, banal qualities of ordinary experience.
These eggshells have been exhibited in five exhibitions, four of which were juried shows:
Nine Months of Eggs, in Rochester Finger Lakes Exhibition, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY August 15-October 15, 2021 https://mag.rochester.edu/exhibitions/67th-rochester-finger-lakes/
Nine Months of Eggs, national juried exhibition Last Year on Earth, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, March 5-May 8, 2021 http://www.rochestercontemporary.org/exhibitions/last-year-on-earth/
Blueprints: Concerning Legibility - Eggshells, Portals and Portholes National Juried Exhibition, Main Street Arts, Clifton Springs, NY, April 16-May 26, 2022 https://mainstreetartscs.org/exhibitions/portals-and-portholes/
Blueprints: Concerning Legibility - Eggshells, invited exhibitor, Davis Gallery, Hobart William Smith Colleges, Geneva, February 11-March 10, 2022Nine Months of Eggs, in Small Works National Juried Exhibition, Main Street Arts, Clifton Springs, NY, December, 2021 https://mainstreetartscs.org/exhibitions/small-works-2021/
Blueprints: Concerning Legibility - Eggshells, invited exhibitor, Davis Gallery, Hobart William Smith Colleges, Geneva, February 11-March 10, 2022