This series began during a three month stay in Berlin in the Fall of 2009. Within Berlin’s famously cyclical layering of destruction and reinvention, the “absences” are persistently and inexorably woven with everything physically “present,” a condition of inversion that mirrors many aspects of the working process in this series. The symbols of people, places and ideas that no longer exist, in which societies invest meaning—whether carved ancestor figures in an extinct African culture, or paving stones set in streets across Berlin where the Wall once stood—provide many of the visual references, which are scavenged from field photos and various printed sources.