Spectral Archetypes
2022These apparitions shimmer on the edge of recall as relics from no specific past, phantasmagoric yet deeply familiar. They are spectral architectures built from longing and recognition, stitched together from the soft machinery of memory, emotion, and light. Cloaked behind veils of diffraction, they flicker in and out of stability, enacting a theater of becoming in which identity is not declared but dreamt. Each figure is an echo of something ancient and unnamed—a resonance rather than a portrait. They rise like reflections in a stormy mirror: part oracle, part phantom, part forgotten kin. Their presence is never stable. Instead, they pulse, refract, resist. To gaze upon them is to engage in a choreography of shifting meanings, to participate in a ritual of seeing that is as much about unknowing as it is about recognition.
The act of placing these figures behind refractive veils parallels my own attempt to constellate psychic remnants, giving old emotional architectures new form and vitality. Through interference patterns and optical hauntings, I invite a rehearsal of perception—not to reveal truth, but to suggest that every truth is superimposed with shadow, and every shadow is a prism. These works are not representations but emissaries. They beckon from a liminal zone—a palatial ruin in the psyche where the baroque and the spectral co-mingle. Here, archetypes move beyond inherent icons into emergent frequencies, sculpted by encounter, experience, and desire.
Spectral Archetypes offer no answers. Instead, it invites orientation within a psychosomatic multiplexity: a shimmering labyrinth of symbolic intelligence and sensual perception, where the archetype is not a fixed motif but a refracted signal—part prophecy, part invitation, part dream.
The Disappearing Child
Unique hologram, antique daguerreotype in original frame, gilding
2 x 3 in
The Dubious Sentinel
Unique hologram, antique tintype in original frame, gilding
2 x 3 in
The Misanthropic Diviner, 2022 Unique hologram, antique photograph in original frame, gilding
2 x 3 in
The Impertinent Altruist
Unique hologram, antique photograph in original frame, gilding
2 x 3 in
The Toilsome Underwriter
Unique hologram, antique tintype in original frame, gilding
2 x 3 in
The Laconic Paramour
Unique hologram, antique photograph in original frame, gilding
2 x 3 in
The Ingenious Jester, 2022
Unique hologram, antique photograph in original frame, gilding
2 x 3 in
Floralegia
2023These pieces are floral spells gathered not from soil, but from memory’s refracted garden. Suspended in the liminal architecture of vintage frames, each Florilegia specimen is captured in light, rendered in holographic depth, and etched by hand. Each engraving carries the mark of the emotional hand within the technological artifact.
The series takes its name from the ancient practice of the florilegium—a gathering of flowers, both literal and poetic, composed to preserve meaning in times of change. Just as 19th-century flower books assembled blossoms and sentiments to teach and console, these works constellate affective knowledge across time: the purity of the lily, the sorrow of the hyacinth, the unfolding promise of the rose.
Florilegia is both elegy and invocation. These are offerings for the unseen and the yet-to-be-seen—memorials to friends lost, remembered, and imagined into the future. The holograms do not merely display, they shimmer, recede, and return, activating a devotional gaze. They are mirrors of connection disguised as flora, rituals of care encoded in diffraction.
In this series, the flower becomes a vessel of mythic continuity. Each is a psychic emissary, emerging through the diffraction of presence and absence, permanence and ephemerality. To look into them is to gather—not just flowers, but feelings; not just sentiments, but spirits.
: for Friends Lost
Unique hologram, vintage glazing4 x 5 1/2 in
Lily – A flower of purity and passing, the lily has long been associated with the threshold between life and death. It speaks in the language of the sacred—of innocence preserved, of silence honored, and of spirits released gently into the beyond.
: for Friends Remembered
Unique hologram, vintage mirror in original frame, gilding12 x 9 in
Hyacinth – Born from grief and myth, the hyacinth is the bloom of remembrance. It carries the weight of sorrow softened by beauty, offering fragrance in exchange for loss, and memory in exchange for time. In this piece, the hologram cracked during production—a delicate fracture across its spectral surface. I chose to preserve it as a testament to the ruptures and repairs that define our deepest friendships: imperfect, weathered, and still luminous.
: for Friends Yet to Come, 2023
Unique hologram, vintage glazing5 x 8 in
Rose – The rose is a cipher for love in all its unfolding forms—tender, fierce, and yet to be realized. As an emblem of desire and potential, it spirals ever outward, holding the mystery of the not-yet-known within each petal.
CRYSTALLINE
Holograms contextualized within a series of space-time-explicit performative gestures. Brooklyn NY 2018.
December 1 –
Circle-casting Multilogue – This performance included a circle-casting involving an invocation of light and crystal intelligence as well as a multilogue which invited attendees to relate their own stories and experiences with light. A calling of the corners modified to consider physical optics was recited, followed by the encircling of the gallery, body of work, and participants with a line of mixed crystal gravel containing refuse pieces of black tourmaline, rose quartz, labradorite, clear quartz, and lapis lazuli.
December 2 –
Sol Star-light Activation – During an afternoon session the artist and participants explored the light from our local star through reflective and refractive media including: holograms, prisms, mirrors, and crystals. We discussed the life-giving properties of light and used a pile of dirt gathered from a local park to investigate our place in the ecosystem, solar system, galaxy, and universe.
December 15 –
Laser-light Séance – In a recreation of a classic spiritualist séance, the artist invoked messages and images from varying materials including objects brought by attendees. All attendees were then connected by laser light —each holding a small mirror—in a reflected-light sigil-drawing ceremony.
December 16 –
Circle-closing Epilogue – The artist, curator, and participants held a wake ceremony over the body of work covered in black velvet furnerary cloths and encircled by red carnations. The dirt gathered for the previous performance was sprinkled over the body of work and the circle was closed, followed by a gathering of the circle-casting stones with were taken away by the attendees.Crystal Consciousness Meditation Tablets (2017 - 2019)
To Honor All Women and the Divine Feminine (Amniotic Fluid)
December 1 –
Circle-casting Multilogue – This performance included a circle-casting involving an invocation of light and crystal intelligence as well as a multilogue which invited attendees to relate their own stories and experiences with light. A calling of the corners modified to consider physical optics was recited, followed by the encircling of the gallery, body of work, and participants with a line of mixed crystal gravel containing refuse pieces of black tourmaline, rose quartz, labradorite, clear quartz, and lapis lazuli.
December 2 –
Sol Star-light Activation – During an afternoon session the artist and participants explored the light from our local star through reflective and refractive media including: holograms, prisms, mirrors, and crystals. We discussed the life-giving properties of light and used a pile of dirt gathered from a local park to investigate our place in the ecosystem, solar system, galaxy, and universe.
December 15 –
Laser-light Séance – In a recreation of a classic spiritualist séance, the artist invoked messages and images from varying materials including objects brought by attendees. All attendees were then connected by laser light —each holding a small mirror—in a reflected-light sigil-drawing ceremony.
December 16 –
Circle-closing Epilogue – The artist, curator, and participants held a wake ceremony over the body of work covered in black velvet furnerary cloths and encircled by red carnations. The dirt gathered for the previous performance was sprinkled over the body of work and the circle was closed, followed by a gathering of the circle-casting stones with were taken away by the attendees.Crystal Consciousness Meditation Tablets (2017 - 2019)
To Honor All Women and the Divine Feminine (Amniotic Fluid)
To Honor All Women and the Divine Feminine (Amniotic Fluid)
Images by Katherine Finkelstein © 2018
Setting for a Meta-Vanity Table:
Trans-dimensional Looking Glasses
Objects with an imagined place in history, these pieces deconstruct the limits of linear time, allowing for an expansion in the potential of self-reflection. They act as temporal glitches—mirror-fragments from alternate timelines—inviting contemplation not only of who we are, but of who we’ve been and who we might yet become. Through this rupture in sequence, what begins as ornament becomes ontology. Acts that have often been derided as vanity can—through reflecting upon the possibilities of the expansive, complex self—be re-ascribed as moments of invitation and investigation. What might seem, at first, like vanity begins to summon intirigue: to see oneself seeing, to enter the infinite regress of role, mask, memory, and becoming.
These pieces form the setting for a meta-vanity: not a mirror for vanity’s sake, but for multiplicity’s sake—a site of recursive self-observation where the boundaries of gender, history, and authorship dissolve. These mirrors provide a locus of self-presentation and re-presentation, multiplying and superimposing several selves simultaneously. They shimmer not with resolution, but with recursion. These works honor artists who dared to dress themselves in fractured reflections—figures who understood identity as rehearsal, costume, rupture, ritual. This series reflects them, refracts them, and invites you to look again. To perform identity as they did—not as a stable core but as a spiraling, generative force. Their practices—and these pieces—suggest that the mirror is not merely a place of self-regard, but of transfiguration.
Each work is a seed—part of an imagined/eventual installation built to house the altars of alter-egos: complete meta-vanity sets dedicated to artists who used the illusion of self to crack something open.
Trans-dimensional Looking Glass for Organic Honey
2020
Trans-dimensional Looking Glass for Rrose Sélavy
2020
Possible Worlds Where:
These objects serve as representations of, and portals to, imagined worlds where there is reassurance in the everyday. Moments of pleasure and peace become not only possible but abundant, despite circumstance. As they rest upon their seats and light diffuses through their curving surfaces we are reminded that there are always many ways to see each moment. These little sparkling planets are available to be appreciated with the eyes, the hands, and the heart.
Tears water blooming flowers
Happiness flickers like sunshine through leaves
The past kisses the future softly on the forehead
Love makes no promises
Woe confides in joy as a distant lover
Death is only a subtle shifting©C Alex Clark 2021