After the dance hall, the night we went dancing
This project is a work in progress. At its heart is an unfinished mezzotint plate based on a photograph of Andrea Gomez, my husband’s late sister, who died by suicide in March 2023, a few days after our wedding. I began work on the mezzotint as we approached the anniversary of both of these events.
The image comes from a trip to Mexico City in 2018. Andrea and my husband, Aaron, are walking up a night-lit street after leaving a dance hall in Roma Norte. I trailed behind them, feeling grateful for being welcomed into their family, and inspired by Andrea’s connection to the vibrant city she hoped to call home through dual citizenship. Their shadows stretched across the broken concrete, framed by tropical foliage. I snapped the picture, loving it immediately despite neither of their faces being visible. I chose this image as a remembrance; it indirectly captures a portrait of Andrea and a cherished memory, without requiring me to etch her face into copper while navigating grief.
In the wake of her passing and the beginning of this series, I became fixated on slowing the passage of time to create space for a more meaningful life. Time perception researchers at IGPP in Freiburg, Germany, suggest that time can be slowed either through extreme boredom or the constant pursuit of novel experiences.
There is a general understanding that printmakers embrace repetitious modalities, despite the fact that our processes are innately time-consuming and physically demanding. I, too, accept and embrace this reality. As a printmaker, I am uniquely positioned to draw out and slow down my life by recreating this image through various printmaking methods; some familiar, some new and novel to me. I have printed this picture using photopolymer etching, cyanotype, lithography, and risography. But mezzotint stands out: a long, labor-intensive process of smoothing highlights and lifting an image out of shadow—a metaphor for uncovering all the unknowns associated with Andrea’s passing.
Revisiting this memory reminds me that despite these unanswered questions, I can reflect on the beauty Andrea embodied and created while she was with us.