Lynn Marie Kirby has long explored the boundaries between different mediums, between the cultural and the personal, the abstract and the representational. In her new series of “Latent Image Excavations,” she investigates the American landscape by exposing 16mm film stock at different sites, without a camera, absorbing the light of carefully chosen locations. The developed film is then manipulated through a film-to-digital transfer machine. She literally performs the material as it is being transferred, using the machine in a unique way that retains both unpredictable film artifacts-splices, sprocket holes, scratches, leader lettering-and digital ones: icons embedded in the machine, geometric color bars and fields, as well as the indications of fast forwarding and technical overload, all elements that are usually unwanted and unseen. The results are beautiful, surprising works that retain resonances of the original sites and accidents of the process. In the series of Bay Area exposures she captures the light of the Golden Gate, the intersection where she lives, a church, and a karate test (Intersection; Posed for Parabolas; Lenten Light Conversions; James Black Belt Test). In Los Angeles she explores what is and is not native, exposing film to a jacaranda tree, a chapel, and native plants (Jacaranda Tree, Chalon Road Exposure; Mount St. Mary's Chapel Exposure; Huntington Gardens, Native Plant Exposure). Exposures from Nevada include a reservation, a casino, and another chapel (Pyramid Lake Piaute Reservation Exposure, El Dorado Casino Exposure, Chapel of the Bells Wedding Chapel Exposure). Kirby elaborates, “The projections form mnemonic site revelations that prompt the viewer to reflect about local history, collective cultural memory, and the technology through which we record and remember our stories.”