DAY

Cupped in our palms

The hours shimmer

Decades into years

Seconds into millenia

Until day falls

And the first light of night

Comes to trade

Sundust for moondew

Daycrawlers for nightdreamers

DAY (2023) is both a film and a 100-part photographic work exploring the roles that place, tradition and ritual play in forming identity, memory and the perception of time. Day asks a simple question: what is the significance of one day?

Day was shot in a 24-hour period at a lake that has multigenerational significance to the artist’s extended family, a place where, returning year after year, the family weaves itself into a collective, overarching, layered narrative greater than its individual cycles of birth and death. Day is the chronicle of one such ordinary summer day. As its subjects — all children — move through the work’s interconnecting frames, they unconsciously enact a series of rituals, the very nature of ritual — repeating the past while performing the future — placing them in a temporal circuit in which past, present and future occur simultaneously.

While the 100 frames composing Day begin at sunrise and end at sunset, they can be read in multiple sequences that subvert linear time.

Day is part of a larger, ongoing photographic project entitled The Lake (2016-present).