Sun Glyphs is an evolving collection of mixed-media explorations combining photography, painted collage, image transfer on vintage glass, lumen printing, silk flags and performance. Based on photographs of sunlight reflecting off windows onto buildings and sidewalks in Brooklyn and Manhattan, this work forms a catalogue of luminous patterns I’ve come to see as a secret system of light language hiding in plain sight in the urban landscape.

Archiving these glyph-like reflections on my daily walks is a devotional practice for me—a way to unhook from the frenetic pace of city life and reconnect to nature’s slower, more cyclical experience of time. By incorporating the glyphs into mixed media works animated through ritual and performance, I invite participants to blur the boundaries within their perceptions of what is urban and natural, masculine and feminine, fixed and ephemeral, material and spiritual, bordered and free.

Over the last four years I’ve been cataloging these reflections during my daily walks throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan and transforming the source photographs into mixed media works incorporating collage, painting, weaving, book arts, sculpture and lumen printing. As the project progresses I’m learning to predict the glyphs’ cyclical variability in each location where they appear, returning to the same sites regularly to watch the shapes change based on time of day, season and weather. This practice reconnects me to ancient practices of tracking time by observing cycles of sunlight against megalithic structures like Stonehenge, Chichen Itzá, and the Egyptian pyramids, while also nodding to contemporary light-based land art explorations like Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. 

I’m especially drawn to the glyphs’ paradoxical qualities. They’re billowing organic light-forms reflecting off rigid rectilinear structures—“feminine” transmissions emerging from male-coded architecture. They’re ephemeral yet predictable, simple yet complex, tiny talismans for what is vast and difficult to name. And for those of us who notice them, stopping to pay attention to something mundane yet poetic in a time of mounting overwhelm and great collective grief, maybe they’re asking us a concretely useful question: now that you can see in this way, what else can you no longer pretend not to see?