Kim Reasor at the Desert Dairy Artist Residency

Fast forward to January 2025.

​A year after losing my dad I return to the Desert Dairy for a two-week residency. The world has gone crazy and I am still battling extreme fatigue and frequent headaches from my covid infection of 2022. I am playing with the jars and the glass again, but now it feels like I am trying to put all the broken things of the world back together in a small way. Making something beautiful out of the detritus of willful destruction. Jars and bottles and cans and old mattresses thoughtlessly tossed onto the sand and left to rust or used for target practice. Vulnerable people and ecosystems and agreements to co-exist just tossed onto the sand to burn, disappear, blow away. If I paint for too long or concentrate too hard, I get a splitting headache. But my eyes can notice treasures on the dune, my hands can work for hours arranging and sorting and twisting wire and building armatures for the broken glass.

My second stay here results in the creation of more spirit jars, with time taken to arrange and build structures to hold the glass In place. I did a few photo shoots with them, chasing the exact moment of twilight when the glow of the jars would be most enhanced by the fading desert light.

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