Intercalations

To work with archival photographs is to work with absence. Names are lost, misremembered, and questioned. Context is thin, often broken by long gaps in time. Accuracy, fidelity, and knowing can feel as faded as a photograph left to the elements. In the face of such uncertainty, the allure of digital technologies can be strong. They promise an alternative—the possibility of seeming congruence and completeness.

The works begin from a simple premise. Disparate images are brought into relation on a digital canvas. AI is then used to interpolate what isn’t there; it proposes context and assembles the semblance of a contiguous landscape, vignette, or scene.

With artificial intelligence comes the capacity to fabricate—to make whole an image, a story, or an identity. What is traded is uncertainty for a certainty of believable truths, drawn from libraries and datasets curated by powerful institutions that train these systems. This exhibition, Intercalations, examines this duality: the desire to know and the pull toward closure, and the technological forces that shape how we understand our place in history.