Silhouettes. Museum walls. Staircase reflections.
Reflections of the Past was shot at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, and it is the one from that stretch that went inside - the same trip as the Botanical Gardens shoot and the rain-curtain frames at Railroad Park. Fifteen frames, split between the galleries and an iron staircase outside at dusk. The Nashville artist works a single look throughout - a black hoodie and camo pants, a cap with a long strap left hanging, a pearl chain and a turquoise beaded necklace that reads as the only colour in most of the frame.
The set is built on subtraction. Hard midday sun against a bleached exterior wall flattens him to pure outline - head dropped, the cap strap falling across the face, the beaded chain the one detail the light lets through. Frame after frame is the same graphic idea worked from a new angle: profile, three-quarter, facing down the lens, the body always a black shape against something pale.
Indoors the light turns warm and low. He leans into a small gilded painting hung on a deep crimson wall - a classical religious work of a bowed figure - until his silhouette nearly merges with the dark around it, his own posture echoing the one in the canvas. He posted the VOID's own scripture from inside the building: "Mankind turned it's back against God, and so the VOID opened it's maw and promised to consume all. The VOID is patient. The VOID cannot be contained!" (Desolation 3:1-3) (view the post)
It ends outside on the staircase. Blue dusk, iron railings, glass panels behind him throwing back the reflection of bare trees and a lit building across the way. A few frames catch him from behind at the top of the steps, still and upright; others shoot up from below as he descends, the fence and the reflected skyline wrapping his figure. The view is doubled in the surface while he climbs through it as a shape. He posted from the staircase itself: "I was always there, hiding in plain sight..." (view the post)
What "Reflections of the Past" means
A reflection is a thing you cannot touch - the past handed back to you on a hard surface, at a remove. The shoot takes that literally: history as a backdrop to stand in front of, gallery walls and old staircases and a religious painting, none of it his, all of it throwing his outline back at him. Reducing the body to a silhouette is the move - no face to read, no year to place him in, just a shape moving through rooms built long before him. In the wolf's telling the father's wisdom is always close and the past is never really closed; here it is architecture, and he walks it like he holds the deed.
It is the most stripped-down shoot of the winter run - one fit, no colour, the building doing all the talking.
SEE ALL 15 PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT HERE
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