Because the Sky
is the Same Sky for Everyone, 2017

In the cover of darkness, beside the woods, garden, and lake, the only light available all summer was from the moon and stars. The full moon appeared an unusual number of times that summer in July and August: with a full moon, a harvest moon, and a blue moon. For this series, I returned to my archive to revisit an earlier work of photographs taken at night. 

My curiosity for photos of the sky – the outtakes of the previous series – was in the unique language of photography… How a negative is a kind of “ghost image” to its positive twin. When I digitally reversed the photos to create a negative image, I discovered an altered landscape. The forest tree line in the positive image became a glowing white space in the negative; and where the sky was darkest in the positive - luminous, muted colors appeared in the negative.

The language of photography is rooted in the mirrored relationships of light and dark, negative and positive, reversals and halves.  By inverting the photographs taken during my mother’s last summer (while she slept), I was able to reveal something otherwise obscured by darkness, discovering a shadow world. The visual language of night blacks and greys converts into a spectrum of hidden color. The resulting images, bathed in different color hues and softness, is not only an exploration of the slipstream between life and death. Here the sky harbors a hidden spectrum of color, registering its light as moons/ suns/ black holes. This work suggests a discovery of the possible - beyond the known, visible world. 

Because the Sky is an artist book in an edition of 50, housed in a clear plexiglass case, as well as a series of prints. As “Happy Hour” marks the transition time between day and night, an in-between time of shifting light, Marchand named each image for a cocktail that marks the hour.

  1. Aunt Agatha

  2. Queen Rose

  3. Apples and Starfruit

  4. Vesper

  5. Silver Clover Club

  6. Fall to Pieces

  7. Blueberry Shrub

  8. 8. Jack’s Shadow

  9. Bijou

  10. House of Friends

  11. Forever Young

  12. The Last Word

  13. Black Velvet