Dial +1

copper, wire, film negatives, and photographs,  2024

Dial +1 is an archive of resistance forged from the debris of my photographic practice—discarded prints, fractured negatives, and industrial detritus—transformed into a tactile testament to collective struggle. The installation layers digital photographs etched onto oxidized copper, film negatives suspended like fragile relics, and reclaimed metal shards bound by taut, wired structures. These materials, both precarious and enduring, mirror the fragility and tenacity of the movements they document. The forms, straining under tension, echo the fraught energy of protest: a visual metaphor for the push-pull between rupture and repair, erasure and preservation.

This work emerged from my dual role as witness and chronicler of the 2024 anti-genocide demonstrations that swept the Midwest. My camera trailed acts of defiance—from university quads to board rooms and city streets—capturing gestures of solidarity that blurred between body and banner, chant and artifact. The resulting archive is visceral and unstable, resisting neat historical categorization. It interrogates not only the urgency of dissent but also the politics of memory: How do we hold space for what is unresolved? What survives when movements are distilled into images, or when copper outlives flesh and passive newsprint?

Here, waste becomes witness. The corroded metals and emulsions are not mere remnants but active participants, their material decay paralleling the fraught labor of sustaining resistance. Dial +1 does not monumentalize; it exposes, insisting on the weight of what remains unfinished.