Liquid Intelligence

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Liquid Intelligence (2021-22) comprises two sets of images, titled after the location each film roll was shot at, Ottawa Beach and Lake Macatawa . Each location was photographed on Ilford Delta 100 black and white film, which was then soaked in water collected from the site for a period of 60 days. The work is titled after the Jeff Wall essay Photography and Liquid Intelligence , in which Wall posits that the chemical liquidity of analog photographic process has its own innate organic aesthetic sensibility, and that this imparts itself directly upon the image in ways both seen and unseen. The work was also inspired in part by contemporary “film soak” trends, in which color film is soaked or boiled in a variety of liquids in order to partially deteriorate the image. Rather than an arbitrary deterioration, in this case the landscape itself, the imbued aesthetics of the water, mediate the image beyond the lens-based photograph. The images were printed directly onto Ilford MGRC gelatin silver paper, and adhered to PVC plastic backing with archival adhesive. The installations themselves mimicked the form of the film post-developing. They were shown for On Bare Foot , a group exhibition at Hope College’s De Pree Gallery in the Spring of 2022.