Sea Level (2013)

Sea Level is an assemblage of poetic, cartographic and embodied registers of a phantom line — cartographic features that appear on maps, including modern digital ones, despite no longer existing on the ground. The gradient of pigment-filled jars works as a preservation device, referencing Werner's Nomenclature of Colours as a translation of the phantom, of vanishing blues in a found cartographic map of the Dead Sea, and of the sign of "sea level" shown on the road as an imaginary orientation of the disappearing water; the body becomes a measurement of this elusive horizon. The blue lines within the photographs are indexical, abstracted cartographic glyphs that point to a series of physical sea level signs. The sequence of prints materializes the phantom line through experimental xerographic process, referencing its history and aesthetics tied to degeneration, grain, contrast, and chemical smears.