EXiT Talk
Catharine Clark Gallery
November 8, 2025
Catharine Clark (Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA) [CC] It’s my great pleasure to introduce you to Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese. We’ve worked with you for a really long time. I think from when the gallery was at 49 Geary.
Nora Ligorano [NL] We started in 2012.
[CC] So, Menna Street. And we met initially through Zer01 when you were in one of the biennials in San Jose with one of your tapestries made from fiber optic threads. Vanishing Finish is a very different body of work, one that I’m very much loving. I’d love to have you share with the audience a little bit about them, technically and what is going on conceptually.
[NL] Thank you Katie. Before we begin talking about Vanishing Finish, let’s start with Borrowed Time, which was the impetus for the collection we’ve put together that addresses climate change and how climate change affects us all physically and personally, and about how we can respond to its dangers to keep it from accelerating even further.
Borrowed Time
Marshall Reese [MR] In the room next door you’ll see Borrowed Time which we started following a dramatic event that greatly affected us personally. In 2021 we had a terrible fire and lost everything. In the process of going through the inventory of what we lost, it felt almost as if a camera was pulling back from an extreme closeup widening to a satellite view of the outdoors.
We started noticing that what happened to us was happening globally on a much larger scale. In particular, a month after our fire, there was another fire in Lewisville, Colorado, known as the Marshall Fire. Over 1,000 homes were destroyed. And so we began looking at aerial photographs of climate disasters and looking at visual mapping.
It provoked us to wonder why certain cities and sites were photographed and others were not. And then we started thinking about how we could make a clock to show the perils of global warming. We were influenced by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ clocks that show how close humanity is to a nuclear incident.
In the United States of America there’s an unusual lack of interest and avoidance of what is happening to the environment that’s occurring everywhere. We decided to make a series of works with an insistent quality. They tick. They move and you can’t really avoid noticing them or understanding what they’re showing. And then we took off from there.
[NL] They’re basically ordinary Staples wall clocks reconfigured with lenticular images which shift back and forth between pristine landscapes of what once was before and the ensuing climate disaster, whether it was a fire or hurricane, tornado, or floods. There were lots of choices.
[MR] As we started working on Borrowed Time, it’s almost like there was too much happening. The climate is changing so fast. Every week there was another climate disaster. There were so many to choose from.
[NL] We altered the clocks deliberately leaving the second hand because it moves quickly alarmingly so. There’s a sense of rhythm. A sense of expectation and urgency. You hear it tick.
We started with 4 clocks across the contiguous United States then added Alaska and Hawaii for a show in Detroit. Borrowed Time represents all 6 time zones across the United States. Alaska, Hawaii, from East Coast to West Coast.
And after we finished Borrowed Time, we thought why don’t we start working with flora and fauna because all these fires and floods and disasters are affecting life on the planet as well. Climate change is affecting everything, everywhere.
Vanishing Finish
[NL] In the meantime, I had spent the last three years as a conservator of paper and books, working on a collection at the New York City Municipal Archives of the original drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge. I was part of a conservation team stabilizing the collection, which included a lot of blueprints. There were over 11,000 drawings in the whole collection.
And I thought to myself, if I’m ever going to make it to the end of this project. There has to be something to find in these blueprints. They’re telling me something.
What is it? And, one of the things I learned, being the kind of material scientist that I am, is that cyanotypes, like any photograph, when exposed to light, can fade if they don’t have a UV filter in front of them.
Unlike any other photographs, though, you can put the cyanotype into a dark space like a flat file or drawer and they restore themselves. We thought that this process was the perfect kind of dialogue to have with endangered and vulnerable keystone animals, which these prints represent, 49 different endangered keystone animals and plants.
A keystone is an architectural term for the center element of an arch that holds everything together. When a keystone is gone the arch and everything around it collapses. It refers to the whole ecosystem. If a keystone animal disappears, endangered or vulnerable, then the whole ecosystem collapses.
We wanted to stick with that because there’s hope and with some care and vigilance, it’s possible to replenish these animals and plants and even bacteria.
Here in the gallery we are showing 35 prints from a collection of 49.
[MR] When Nora was thinking about the blueprints, I had in my mind to do a project in which the image disappeared. As Katie said we do these large ice sculptures that disappear. We’re interested in durational, performative art over long periods of time. And when Nora said you know, cyanotype blueprints disappear. I said, “Okay. Let’s work with that.”
[NL] What we like about these is that the images are printed on Sekishu Japanese paper. It’s very thin. It’s so thin when you’re developing it, if you don’t handle it properly, it will all just dissolve and dissipate.
[MR] But, Nora being the material scientist she is, figured out a procedure and process to let us manipulate the Sekishu paper while it was wet,
[NL] We wanted to use a material that was translucent and seemingly fragile. Actually, Japanese tissue is not that. It’s incredibly strong. It has very long fibers. When it’s wet and drying the fibers interlock which makes this paper so strong and durable that you can’t tear it when it’s dry. It’s not like Western paper. I learned to work with this kind of paper in my conservation practice.
[Question] Regarding the work behind you, do you all have personal favorites, like animals or plants that speak to you? Or do you just love everything so much?
[NL] Well, my personal favorite, I have two. I love the Tasmanian Devil, because he’s so strange looking. I just love his little teeth. And I like this burying beetle because I like the earlier illustrations from the 19th Century. Both of them were from the late 1800’s illustrations
Marshall?
[MR] I like the star cactus. It reminds me of Yayoi Kusama.
Vanishing Finish was a really great, great project to work on. Nora and I have been developing these prints side by side for months and we learned how to do the process together. And it was kind of a little hairy…. Hair raising. We didn’t know what we were doing. We’d nudge each other out of the way until we got it down to a science where we were working side by side, like clockwork.
[NL] Some of these are exposed using a UV lightbox, which is how you expose cyanotypes and some of them are sun prints. We made all the negatives. We scaled the images up sharpening them from internet sources like the Smithsonian Institution’s Biodiversity Heritage Library. I went back and forth adjusting them to make a decent negative.
Question: In terms of exposure time, which is faster sunlight, or the light box?
[NL] Sunlight. Sunlight in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
[MR] It also depends on the UV factor, the time of the day, things like that. The exposure time in full sunlight I think was like 8 minutes. The prints exposed using the light box is 25 or so minutes, the age of the UV bulbs could also be affecting that.
Question: Which one was the sun print?
[NL] The Bat. It had to do with size and the size of the exposure box. The Bat was too big for it.
[MR] There’s another one in the flat file in the back
[NL] A big, long shark in the flat file in the back.
[CC] The six missing here are in our flat files. if anyone wants to see them.
Question: How long does it take them to disappear in sunlight?
[NL] Well, it’s a really good question.
[MR] We don’t have a conclusive answer to that.
[NL] They were on exhibit in Wyoming at the University of Wyoming Art Museum. We had all 49 up in an area where the sun was beating down on them for six or eight months. The museum insisted that there were no UV filters or anything on the glass where the sunlight was coming through and nothing changed. When we first proposed the project, the curators were very excited because usually artists are really worried about their work in direct sunlight.
But we wanted to see what happens to the prints in direct sunlight. But none of the prints changed in Wyoming. It could also be the fact that perhaps the cyanotype has dyed the fiber of the Sekishu Japanese tissue. I have no idea why it’s so robust.
Audience: UV light has a hard time passing through glass actually. Glass is a natural filter, even if glass doesn’t have a coating on it.
[NL] I didn’t know that. Oh, well, then we have to put them outside.
[CC] We have a lot of windows.
Audience: I think fabrics last longer than the cyanotypes on paper I find.
Audience: To continue the conversation, I’ve seen Anna Atkins’ prints that she made in the 18th century in the British Museum and they look like they were made yesterday.
[NL] The New York Public Library has a huge collection of her work as well. But they don’t like to put it on exhibit much. I don’t know if it’s because they’re concerned about it being exposed to light, but if glass really is a protective surface without any filter on them, that shouldn’t be a concern.
Question: Do you always arrange the prints in the same order? In the different places you’re exhibiting?
[NL] No we don’t. It’s like that little game where you’re moving things around to fit the space. It’s just like that. Sometimes it just winds up that one thing is speaking to the other thing. Or, you know, we might decide that something isn’t right because a fish is next to a fish. Other than that, it’s just a matter of getting a nice clean shape to the collection on the edges. And then the bottom is all irregular.
Question: In this body of work that you’re showing today, you know, I appreciate your distinguishing between the threatened and endangered species and those that are extinct. What was your thinking that went into focusing on that instead of extinct species?
[NL] That’s a really good question. And, the answer to that is if it’s extinct, there’s not much hope of bringing them back. But if it’s threatened or endangered or vulnerable. There’s still hope. And that became the focus of this project. Thank you.
[CC] Okay. Thank you. Thank you all for coming.