BLEIKR

"Bleikr" is an old Norse word meaning "pale or shining", which sets the origin for the English word "Bleak". 

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In the work, images captured under broad desert light slowly emerge through the cyanotype printmaking process and earth tones of the dye, recalling a negative afterimage of the environment. These details along with lines, shapes, textures, and traces of the red marks in each print inform the recording and spatializing process of the natural sonic materials. While vibrations sweep back and forth across the surface, microscopic traces that were once blurry, drifting around our visual and aural horizon, are now entering into our awareness. The faded and the pale, the bleak and the nebulous, the grainy and the whispering, permeate throughout wild landscapes: tinnitus in absolute silence, steaming air and debris under the feet.

 

Bleikr explores a poetic avenue toward a non-anthropocentric scale of time --- one that expresses itself no longer in terms of hours and minutes, but in the forms in the textures, shadows, and sounds of the environment. The temporal and spatial relationships among each print are mapped into the textures of the landscape ---from every grain of sand to every boulder, from every inch of the fissure to the deep movement of the Earth crust, traversing layers of materialities. Crossing the intersections of the material and sensorial, the visual, and the aural, Bleikr exhorts to reveal the fickleness of human beings in geologic time.