I made a graphite on paper rubbing (frottage) of one entire facade of the barn at the Hastings Natural History Reserve in Carmel Valley as part of Unseen California. The rubbing exists in fifteen panels of paper, 45 feet in running length and 30 feet at the peak. Each autumn, woodpeckers collect and store acorns (for later consumption) by embedding them directly into the wooden exterior of the structure. Acorn woodpeckers typically convert oak trees into their granaries, but they will make use of any wood that they can effectively bore into. The acorn woodpecker population at Hastings has been protected and continuously studied for generations. Over 50 years of research and observation of their unique behavior has been cataloged, including their ambitious alteration of the barn.

One can see the rings and growth patterns of the trees used to make the boards etched by the sun’s relentless bombardment, the jagged repeating lines from the blades where the boards were milled, the nails from the workers who built the barn, the contours of a barn swallow’s nest at the apex of the barn’s roof, the countless holes of insects who have made purchase on the wood, and the holes that the woodpeckers have made. To all of these marks, I added my own when I touched every inch of the surface making the rubbing. The barn, as much as it is a competing storage structure for the humans who constructed it and the birds who are adapting and altering it, is also its own dynamic record, made fragile over time.

These blueprints are colored pencil frottage on used, architectural diazo print paper. The rubbings are of wooden boards from a scientific study of acorn woodpecker behavior.  Scientists at the reserve wondered if the woodpeckers would use pre-drilled holes, and it turns out that they do. I made rubbings of the decommissioned boards from the study, using scraps of blueprint paper, adding my marks to those of the birds, the scientists and the architects who made notations on the used blueprints, suggesting a kinship in the woodpeckers’ monumental efforts to engineer their environment. 

In a series of large-scale black-and-white and smaller brightly dyed works, I pulled from my own archive of images documenting the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, which hit my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina in 1989. Contemplating a future in which these storms become increasingly destructive and frequent, I was drawn to images of taped window panes—a pre-storm ritual seemingly more shamanic than practical in its ability to provide any protection.

California Dreaming was the name of a Charleston restaurant that appeared in a newspaper image of the storm’s aftermath. Softcover, digital offset, 6 x 8.75in, edition of 300 signed & numbered, self-published, 2019. Text by Claire Pentecost, Design by Victoria Manferdelli, printed by Conveyor Studio

Here, space between perception and knowledge is an underlying principle in an investigation of personal objects: my great grandmother’s bandanna—pale pink, printed with a starburst pattern—and a second vintage bandanna owned by Georgia O’Keefe—dyed indigo and accented with white dots—the kind of ubiquitous textile that seems to have no author or origin. I used pin pricks to meticulously transfer the starburst and dot designs from textile to paper. I complete the process in darkness, feeling rather than seeing my progress. Some record light passing through the pinholes and portions of others remain unexposed, holding only the perforations in the paper itself.

Personal and public photographic archives draw connections between seemingly disparate storylines – an American road trip, the return of Halley’s Comet, and NASA’s Teacher in Space program, which invited the first civilian to leave the Earth aboard the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986. Shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award, 2016. Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going, Why? By Aspen Mays & Dan Boardman, edited by Christina Labey, designed by Elana Schlenker. Published by Conveyor Studio & Houseboat Press, 2016. 206 Full Color Pages, Double Wire-O Bound, Edition of 500

Drawing on real-time satellite feeds of maritime positioning data, custom software determines when and where two ships “pass in the night” anywhere on the open ocean. A panel of bright lights flash, signaling these serendipitous moments. A printer records the names of the ships and their locations.

Just days before one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded devastated central Chile in 2010, I arrived in Santiago to begin a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Chileʼs Astronomical Observatory. I used an abandoned darkroom at the Observatory for my studio, and it was against this backdrop of destruction that Sun Ruins was conceived. During this time, I had access to rejected prints, negatives and ephemera from the labʼs archive, and Sun Ruins brings together two series that I created from this material. Both components call into question the expectation of photography as a documentary and categorical medium and each explore—to different ends—the visualization of knowledge in both studio art and observational practices.

To create the series Punched out stars, I used a hole punch to physically remove each prominently-visible star from found silver gelatin prints of unknown dates.

The Sun 1957 is the collective title of 25 silver gelatin prints that depict the Sun from a mid-century international survey of sunspots. Finding the film negatives separated from contextualizing logbooks and labeled only by month and the year 1957, I loosely followed this organizing principle by making contact prints of the negatives in grids. There is no record of November.

The photograms reproduced in this book are made from my collection of dodging tools, started in 2010, with several that I found in an abandoned darkroom at the National Astronomical Observatory in Chile during a Fulbright Fellowship. I was initially struck by the ways in which their basic utility seemed to stand in opposition to the vast technological sophistication of the telescopes being used at the same facility. I came to think of their improvisational character as sharing a common tool-making impulse, all in service to the subjective nature of seeing.

Utilizing humor, this work approaches profound questions of existence from the perspective of an amateur and non-scientist, accessing a common desire to understand concepts that may feel outside of the grasp of the scientifically untrained. This body of work utilizes a wide range of photographic techniques from photogram and experimental light sources, to performance documentation, sculpture made specifically for the camera, high-res scans, and video.

For this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Chicago, I produced a site-specific photographic installation titled Every leaf on a tree. The installation consisted of two bodies of work: Every leaf, which documents every leaf on a tree outside of the my studio at the time and consists of over 900 individual color photographs; and Every book, a series of photographs that document every book about Albert Einstein available through the Illinois Collegiate Inter-Library Loan service. These were then organized according to the color spectrum to create a series of individual “rainbows”—referencing Einstein’s theories about light and gravity.