At the heart of Chavez’s work is a profound attention to the paradoxical physicality of light, both as she manipulates it in the studio and as it is produced and transmitted through the deep recesses of space. Indeed, light is the subject as well as medium of her art: first, she addresses the way light is, itself, not merely a concrete “thing” at all, but a relationship or process, and—in cosmological terms—even the measure of time; second, she literally embodies her faith that everything that can be seen but hints at the much greater unseen that shapes it, challenging the notion that what is visible or directly accessible to our senses is the most “real.” In seeking novel techniques of photographic image-making, she helps us reconnect to ancient ways of knowing ourselves and each other.

​

Cosmic light and earthly bodies

​

The first point of connection between Chavez’s aesthetic project and wider contemporary struggles to understand the human place in the cosmos is among the most readily apparent aspects of her work. Many of the photographs in her A Thousand Rainbows project explicitly reference imagery produced by one of the most iconic photographic platforms of the 20th and early 21st century—the Hubble Space Telescope—and establish from the outset a synergy between the ways of seeing employed by the artist and the scientist. From its orbit high above the obscuring atmosphere of Earth, the Hubble has collected and focused light from the farthest reaches of time and space, and delighted us with the previously unseen beauty of the cosmos: supernovae, nebulae, galaxies and the planets of our own solar system. But while such images as Andromeda, Gravity’s Star-Stripping Force, and Last Confessions of a Dying Star may seem obvious in their parallels with astronomical photos of spiral-arms, luminous clouds, and exploding stars, Chavez’s fascination with cosmology and astronomy is much more than a superficial appreciation of the beauty revealed by scientific instruments. Even those works which seem to directly echo the shapes and motions of celestial objects are not recreating those images so much as unveiling the way parallel relationships at the human and cosmic scales seem to arrive at a shared “iconography”—suggestive of the deep connections between earthly bodies and heavenly ones.

 

Chavez’s technique in making those connections visible, though, asks us to re-examine our expectations of photographic image-making. Even in an age both used to and wary of digital manipulation, we default to the idea that photographs show us what is real about things by momentarily stopping processes and “capturing” light in an instant; we are still inclined to think that truth comes “in a flash.” But both Hubble’s and Chavez’s photographs, which we perceive in an instant on the page or (more likely) the screen, are artifacts of time stretched out, not frozen. First of all, to render the faint light of distant galaxies visible requires extraordinarily long camera exposures—it takes hours and days of focused attention on a tiny spot in the sky in order to collect the light needed for each of Hubble’s amazing pictures. More fundamentally, though, the light recorded by astronomical sensors or seen by our upwards-gazing eyes may have taken thousands or millions—if not billions—of years to reach us, giving us a window into the distant past and only hints of processes that are still ongoing across the depths of space.

​

Likewise, Chavez does the opposite of stopping action via the photograph, and builds up her images by stretching time out, coaxing light to reveal the way motion and change are the very stuff of material and spiritual relationships, the essence of creation. Last Confessions of a Dying Star is not an image of a distant supernova, after all, but the intimate record of expressive human movement and communication. Here is Chavez’s own description of her work:

​

Both personal and philosophical, my process has developed over a lifetime of residing at the intersection of painting, ritualistic dance, and photography. I do not use any digital manipulation to achieve these results . . . Each photographic image is the result of a built-up choreographic exercise in which I direct both light and the movement of my model-dancer…I have developed various light brushes which assist in its specific, controlled application…[and] apply hundreds of subtle, feathery layers of light to the figure as a painter would apply an almost imperceptible glaze. Individually, a single layer of light would not be visible to the camera, but the accumulation of many layers creates a composite effect. While directing the application of light, I improvisationally choreograph my model's  movement through a continuum of time - a temporal mode made possible by the durational technology of open shutter photography. The result of this process is a two-dimensional sculpted form—a composite of many actions over a duration of time, all taking place within a single frame negative. In sum, my craft is focused on maintaining the integrity of a process driven by ever-imperfect attempts to harness the elegant wildness and uncompromising honesty of light.

​

Whether looking into the recesses of space or at Chavez’s photography, then, it is critical that we remember that light is not just a medium, or merely a trace, but the very substance of interactions that are both beautiful and wrenchingly powerful. The lovely shapes and colors we see in the heavens are glimpses of tremendous, primal, often competing forces at work bending, twisting, compressing and releasing both matter and energy together: gravity guides the dance of distant galaxies, but it also fuels the nuclear fire at the heart of the stars. Similarly, what we see as ephemeral beauty in the artist’s work is actually a materialization of profoundly physical actions and relationships, including ones of intimacy, commitment, and sacrifice: her model, who Chavez thinks of as her “second self,” was so willingly exhausted by the process of creating Last Confessions of a Dying Star, for instance, that she all but collapsed at the end of the session. So while we imagine we are seeing an “object” in space, what is made visible in the work is not so much a thing, but the materiality of change, the process of becoming, the playing out of a relationship between subjects who each have deep and intrinsic beauty and value. 

​

Indeed, it is on account of this ongoing, relational, and deeply subjective quality of the artist’s approach to imagery that the language of iconography is so appropriate for describing the similarities she reveals between the motions and makeup of celestial bodies and human ones. For in Orthodox Christianity, icons are not merely “pictures” of saints or of Christ, but symbolic participants in a dialogue between the material and spiritual, played out with real human beings in specific sacred times, places, and communities. Both in the process of their creation and in the way they are incorporated into the rhythms of worship, icons “bear the image” of their subjects, giving material shape to intangible identity.

​

For Chavez, a similar dynamic is at play between heavenly and human bodies, too—hearkening back to ancient Biblical texts that describe the cosmos as the temple of the Creator, and human beings as the icons set in it in order to bear that divine image into the material world. Though only the human image carries the weight of full relationship and calling, both temple and image alike give witness to a shared maker. Yet because the linkages Chavez explores between human forms and celestial ones are neither strictly material nor merely metaphorical, and instead exist at a point of mystery somewhere between those two, they are past the limit of what we can assess by the tools of science alone and suggest the importance of incorporating more creative and speculative approaches, as well. As she says, “the photograph… is wired to fail as a trustworthy depiction of the Real, just as the analytic intellect fails” to adequately address “the universal intuition that the body goes beyond itself.” 

On the other hand, she is equally confident that careful and rigorous analysis is indispensable, and in both science and art, it is precisely the failure of present models and techniques to adequately explain and represent what we find before us in the cosmos, coupled with an abiding fascination with the mystery that always remains, that drives further investigation and exploration, leading us further out and deeper into the world and ourselves. Chavez has noted that “inhabiting this uncomfortable region of unknowing—becoming a child over and over and over again—is one of the essential utilities of art,” but considering her embrace of insights from cosmology and physics as well, it is clear that the same must also be said of science, and—a point to which we will return shortly—most profoundly of faith.

​

The seen and the unseen

​

I have already mentioned that both Chavez’s work and astrophotography depend on specialized techniques to make visible that which is ordinarily beyond our sight: specifically, the way that time is stretched in long-duration exposures from space and in the artist’s studio, allowing ephemeral glimpses to build up into coherent shapes. With the camera’s shutter open, Chavez applies a glance of light to an arm or a leg of her model, whom she then invites into a new position where she is illuminated again, and again. Over the course of the exposure, those traces build up and allow us a vision of the choreographic interplay they share. Yet thinking more expansively about the concrete physical interactions through which Chavez’s images take shape upon the photographic plate brings us back to the second way in which her process has clear parallels with both spiritual and scientific descriptions of how the cosmos works: Chavez’s own always-invisible presence in the studio (and hence also in the images) affirms the profound reality of what may always remain invisible to ordinary sense—the powerful influence of what we can not observe on what can be readily seen. 

​

By some estimates, 83% of the material cosmos is made up of dark matter—mysterious stuff known only indirectly by the effect it has on the more familiar and visible kind of matter and light. Here, too, light is the medium through which we come to “see” what remains hidden, as cosmologists measure the mass of dark matter in specific galaxies and in the universe as a whole by looking for the way light is bent, compressed and shaped by gravity that can not be accounted for looking only at what reflects, absorbs and transmits it in ordinary ways. That same “excess” gravity directs the movements of normal visible matter, influencing the orbital courses of stars, galaxies and whole clusters of galaxies. Leaving aside the even more exotic “dark energy” proposed to describe other anomalies in how the universe moves and grows, dark matter seems to confirm the human intuition that what is unseen is at least as real and powerful than what can be seen directly. 

​

If there is an equivalent of this cosmic unseen reality in Chavez’s artistic practice, it is Chavez herself, as she directs the actions of her model by her own expressive and communicative dance, even while also (literally) shedding light on moments and movements of their shared experience. In this way, the most significant interaction made visible in the photographs of A Thousand Rainbows is not what occurs between light and the body of her model, or the body of her model and the open shutter, but between the model and Chavez, herself. The artist is author of the entire experience and process, yet willingly joins with her model in the strenuous and reciprocal experience of creation, all the while staying out of direct view of those who come after and are privileged to see only the exquisite trace of the dance. Looking carefully at what Chavez has chosen to show us in her art, and—especially—listening to the witness of Chavez’s own descriptions of the collaborative and intimate engagement that occurs in her studio, we come to know what and who remains hidden from sight. 

There is more than a superficial similarity, then, between Chavez’s photography of the human body and the representations of celestial objects and processes that are produced by the latest scientific instruments as part of the human drive to understand the material world in which we make our way. There is also more than an accidental echo of theological language in how she approaches and represents human subjectivity through these hybrid images—whether that subjectivity belongs to herself or to her model. For Chavez, the relational and spiritual symmetry between these sets of images points us towards a better understanding of the ongoing engagement between the Creator and we, his created image-bearers. Chavez’s intimate and caring (but difficult) work with and through her model—both directing and revealing her movements, but also allowing, inviting her to be herself and live into her own expressive freedom—mirrors Chavez’ sense of the Creator’s personal engagement with and immanence in the material world. 

​

Put another way, Chavez’s photography is not only a testament to and revelation of the intensely personal way she manipulates light and the human form, but more generally of the way personal interactions and relationships are profoundly real even while seeming ephemeral, immeasurable, and even invisible. Though we do not directly see Chavez’s own body in her images, her experience of dance as an “operating system for [her] visual thinking” is the prerequisite for what she asks of her model, and the photographs could not exist without her presence in the room—guiding, responding, illuminating, having ‘been there herself’ in the dance as well as behind the camera. In Chavez’s work as in the Creation, the image is an extension of creator and a marker of intimacy, not distance. 

​

Because she, herself, bears and claims the (relational) image of God, Chavez lives in and explores the unifying tension of being both process and object, matter and spirit, maker and made—giving that tension visible form through her art. In seeking connection and intimacy as well as technical mastery in the process of bringing forth her works, Chavez seeks to reconcile our most ancient intuitions with the most contemporary accounts of what the cosmos is, what it means, and where we fit within it. Though her body, like the bodies of us all, remains the site of an elusive mystery of identity, it can also be, as she says, “a dimly twinkling signifier of the beyond – a sort of crumpled map of the heavens,” and the sign of the continuing presence of the Creator not just in the lives of the stars and galaxies above, but also in the lives of human beings here below.