Love At First Sight Machine (LAFS), 2024

Pen and Ink on Strathmore 3-ply plate

14” x 18”

Inspired by The National Museum of American History’s ‘Lighting a Revolution’ Exhibit’, featuring inventions from throughout Thomas Edison’s lifetime.

Many of the inventions from the early days of harnessing electricity would splice together several different functions into one machine such as, in one case, a bread toaster, fan, and lightbulb-all in one.

These machines are so different from what we now use that they begin to feel fantastical and otherworldly-it got me thinking about the magical realism that is harnessing electricity.

If we can harness such a seemingly untamable power, what would it be like to channel more abstract energies-like emotions?

‘Love at first sight’ is a vivid, potentially mythic emotion. Here, I imagined what the processes behind ‘manufacturing’ such an intense emotion may look like.