The Latent Light Excavation Series is a continuation of my engagement with
American history and its residue in the landscape. Sites carry traces of their history, but also act
as reservoirs of memory, as virtual sites. Each final projection in the series is a document of the
landscape itself, a slice through time to what lies below the visible, an archive and critique of
what it means to be an American.

For this series, I use a hybrid process, employing both 16mm film and digitization systems to
excavate the invisible history of American landscapes and to reconsider and make visible media
technology within the transfer process of film to digital. I exposed 16mm raw film stock without a
camera. As in the Translation Series, this exposure encodes on the film both the light of the site
and the performance of a gesture. Next, the developed film is used as source material for an
improvisation on a film to digital transfer/encoding deck, using the film material like a chart or
thematic framework on which to improvise.

The material aspects of the film source medium are revealed through usually hidden,
unintended and unwanted artifacts: dust, scratches, hole punches, head and tail leader
information. Uniquely and typically unwanted digital artifacts are introduced to the transfer
process.

These American sites are chosen for their complex histories. The works function at times as
memorial gestures or homages and at times as celebrations or critiques.

This series eventually expanded to include exposures at international sites, including in
Lebanon, Rwanda and the Jordan staircase in St. Petersburg, among others.

"For Kirby, the image and colors chosen become 'a jumping off point for thinking about history'
and the image's relationship to the history it references. For her, the 70-year history of the
bridge is evoked through blacks, whites, and sepia, colors that suggest Kirby's interest in early
film with its black and white and toned images. The film, she says, meditates on the whole
'history of the bridge.' The piece also meditates on another current technological crossing --
from celluloid film to digital media -- as the latest in a history of crossings in which emergent and
residual technologies intermingle."
- Tess Takahashi

"The recent work of Lynn Marie Kirby can be understood as a way of using seemingly
transcendent aesthetic forms to achieve a deeper form of immanence...While Kirby is clearly an
heir to the legacies of formalist modernism in film and video art, her work moves through this
trajectory and back again. Like earlier experimental filmmakers, Kirby employs painterly
abstraction, the radical condensation of time, and the direct registration of space on the material
substrate of the medium. But she almost always uses formal schemas in order to return to the
things themselves. Kirby examines the uniqueness, irreducibility, and the emotional
ramifications of the particular moment, locating the palpable residues of the everyday. But like
later, more systematic filmmakers such as Gehr, Akerman, and Snow, Kirby attends to the larger
patterns, repetitions, and reversals that organize both perception and our lived experience.
Kirby's work uses shape and form to excavate (her term, and an absolutely opposite one) both
the particularity of individual moments, and the cycles of lived, embodied existence, of artistic
creation, of motherhood and family life, or urban dwelling and international transit. Her work is,
ultimately, about the structures we use to access our world, and what we care most about in it."
- Michael Sicinski


Polk and Filbert Street Exposure: intersection (2003)
The film was exposed at the intersection of the cross streets where I live and is the first
of the series of site/light and film/video intersections.


Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: poised for parabolas (2004)
A tribute to the people who have lost their lives over the years in the construction of the
bridge and from suicide. I see the bridge daily from my apartment and have long been
haunted by the power of its presence, a gateway to both death and the world beyond
mainland US borders.


St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Lenten light conversions (2004)
This was produced during the forty days of lent, a time for spiritual renewal and
conversion from an inward to outward time. I was also contemplating the crisis of the
American Catholic Church.


Black Belt Test Exposure: Senpai James finds his line (2004)
This was exposed during my son#s Karate black belt test. It is both a celebration of his
achievement, the stages from white through black belt and the "focus, attitude and
discipline" required for a black belt.


Jacaranda Tree, Chalon Road Exposure: Brazilian transplant (2004)
Exposed under the light of a Jacaranda tree on a street in Los Angeles. These Brazilian
transplants now populate the American landscape.


Huntington Gardens, Giant Cactus Exposure: California native (2004)
Exposed under the light of the once common California native, now mostly found in
landscaped gardens. This exposure took place in the native California section of the
industrialist Henry Huntington#s public botanical garden.


Mount St. Mary's Chapel Exposure: Galician import (2004)
Exposed to the light of Sisters of St. Joseph's Spanish Revival Chapel at the site of the
piece's first installation. Similar to plants, imported ideas are transformed by their
transplantation. Catholicism has always absorbed significant elements of new host
cultures. Visually, this is often manifest in architecture.


Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation Exposure: as long as the rivers flow (2004)
Exposed to the light of this endorheic lake, a site of on-going struggle: geological
presence, Native American history, the pressures of contemporary urbanization, water
pollution and water rights struggles in the Western US.


Chapel of the Bells Wedding Chapel Exposure: to have and to hold (2004)
Exposed at a drive through wedding chapel, marriage -- a site of hopes fulfilled and
frustrated. There were no gay marriages allowed in Reno wedding chapels at this time.


El Dorado Exposure: house stands on 17 (2004)
Exposed at a casino in Reno. The city of gold is the imagined image of infinite wealth.


Lebanon Exposure: salvaged from the open sea (2005)
Walid Raad exposed this film for me when he returned to Lebanon during the critical
times of March in 2005. My performance of the exposed film is in conversation with the
Atlas Group's project of latent information in Secrets in the Open Sea.


Karate Class Exposure: three variations (2005)
First made as part of an evening of video and performance engaging the teacher/
student relation, with my former student Harrell Fletcher, my son James and his karate
teacher, Sensei Shanas. The video has three sections.

Part I: the space itself/ silent
16mm film was exposed to the general light and space of the Karate One dojo on
Van Ness Avenue in my San Francisco neighborhood. I work with the blue frame
of the tatami mat to mediate on repetition and variation, in both film and karate.

Part II: points of contact: motion studies after Muybridge/ sound
I recorded the sound of a series of kicks that James practiced in the dojo with his
Sensei. Instead of using video as the image-recording medium, we used black
ink and paper. The paper recorded the energy of the kicks. The footprints/paper
kicks were scanned into the computer and played with the sound recorded in the
dojo.

Part III: second star form/ sound
16mm film was exposed while James was practicing his second star form. I use
the star icon visible only inside the transfer machine to mediate on the star form
that he was practicing. Alex Lukas, a San Francisco sound artist, was
commissioned to do a sound rubbing composition of the dojo.


Requiescat (2006)
This 100-foot roll of film contains 1000 X's. Each "X" scratched into the film is a prayer or
a wish for the repose of a person killed in Iraq. In transferring the film to digital video, I
did not etch an "X" for each death into the film emulsion anew, instead, I punched the
transfer machine each time I saw an "X" pass in real time. This new gesture marks each
death anew, with a skip or glitch or polarity change.


DVD contains Compression and Tension (Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: poised for parabolas, Black Belt Test Exposure: Senpai James Finds His Line, St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions), Refracted Case Histories (Jacaranda Tree, Chalon Road Exposure: Brazilian Transplant, Huntington Gardens, Giant Cactus Exposure: California Native, Mount St. Mary's Chapel Exposure: Galician Import), Latent Image Excavations: Reno (Chapel of the Bells Wedding Exposure: To have and to hold, Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation Exposure: As long as the rivers flow, El Dorado Casino Exposure: House Stands on 17), Polk and Filbert Street Exposure: Intersection, Lebanon Exposure: Salvaged from the open sea, Karate Class Exposure: Three Variations, Requiescat, and Russian Arc: Across Cinematic Time.