That Day We Saw the Clouds Together, But They Have Gone Forever
Aluminum, Acrylic, Electrical Devices
36 x 24 x 1.5 in.
That Day We Saw the Clouds Together, But They Have Gone Forever renders a blurred image of sunset clouds, suspending a fleeting moment between clarity and disappearance. The image is indistinct, as if already in the process of leaving. It is not a document of a view, but the residue of a feeling.
We look at the same sky, but never from the same interior condition. The work is rooted in a specific memory: sitting beside someone, watching the sunset through a window, wishing—quietly, impossibly—that the moment might last. However, neither the clouds nor the person stayed.
The LED screen is deliberately embedded within a disproportionately large aluminum structure, occupying only a small fraction of the object’s physical presence. Drawing on Francesco Casetti’s analysis in Screening Fears: On Protective Media, the screen here does not function as a window that brings the world closer. Instead, it operates as a protective apparatus—a shelter that mediates and contains what might otherwise be overwhelming. Casetti argues that modern screens increasingly serve as defensive enclosures, insulating us from a world perceived as threatening rather than transparently revealing it.
Here, the “threat” is not external reality, but memory itself, the externality of memory. The blurred LED image echoes the fundamental unreliability of recollection: memory does not return the past as it was, but as a residue shaped by longing, loss, and repetition. At the same time, memory is dangerous precisely because of its affective force. It can trap the subject in a compulsive return to what has already vanished—an almost addictive attachment to the past that undermines one’s capacity to remain present or imagine the future.
The aluminum frame functions as a protective buffer against this exposure. Its mass, opacity, and material coldness contrast sharply with the fragile, luminous image it encloses, forming a kind of shielding architecture. The screen becomes a controlled zone in which memory can be approached without fully consuming the viewer. This protection is necessary because unmediated remembrance risks collapsing temporal experience: the Heideggerian relation between past, present, and future becomes fractured when the subject is unable to let the past recede.
The work thus stages the screen not as a site of immersion, but as a boundary. What remains is not the sunset itself, but a mediated afterimage—held at arm’s length, protected, and allowed to fade.