Alyson Provax + Zachary Schomburg

Cyanotype on canvas, Diptych

Framed in walnut, 12x24”

Sunlight is a series of three diptychs that explore the remains of our early memories made in the sun. We considered how sunlight makes fleeting, degraded, barely-there impressions in our memory, then from that same sun’s light we literally created impressions of those remains so that they will outlast us both. Though there are themes within each of our work that connect us, we had never met prior to this collaboration, so we were interested in using our lack of knowledge of each other’s lives to explore these memories side-by-side. We emailed each other a number of short childhood memories formed in sunlight, and then we each chose short phrases from the other’s memories to turn into text-based cyanotypes. When we met in person to use sunlight to expose our extracted phrases onto the treated canvases, we lost track of which memories were our own, further emphasizing a shared feeling of loss, self-erasure, and the idea that our memories are just small sun-streaks of the stories we tell ourselves.

Framed by Matt McCalmont @artsubstrates