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ALEX WESTFALL: SEE THROUGH (2026)
Photo by Paul Rho.
Alex Westfall: See Through
June 12–July 31, 2026 at Isolde, New York, NY
Curated by Genevieve Nollinger and Talia Markowitz
Let’s start at the beginning. A prism refracts a moment to celluloid. Later, the negative becomes positive this passage of light forming what we know as the photograph. On paper: a discrete “after” in the series of transformations.
But it’s not as simple as to say that See Through starts at the beginning. Alex Westfall starts instead with realized images: negatives from her father’s work as his high school yearbook photographer in Brookline, Massachusetts; a close-up of the delicate piña-fiber shirts worn at her parents’ wedding in the Philippines, the first roll of film she developed as a pre-teen. Then, slipping between the elsewhere of the photo and the present, she plicates time. Moments separated by years and distances as far as from 1978 to 2026, Manila to Los Angeles, are brought into direct contact. Using light as both medium and entry, Westfall iterates through three generations of photographs to elucidate her place within them. The archive, as she articulates it, can be as unfixed and recent as yesterday.
Westfall’s photographs progress like an advancing and unwinding roll of film, but their revolution is non-chronological and ever-collapsing. Single frames hold multiple timelines and perspectives, and sometimes the same light. A window from 1996 stretches to meet a window from 2025. A 2006 home movie becomes a Cornish rock pool’s mirage. A hidden silhouette, lifted from an Instagram post made by the grandmother she last saw as a child, makes for a temporary reunion. Materially, Westfall pushes the typical cause and effect of the photograph from indexical record to indexical conversation where dream and history are held equal, challenging the stasis of the decisive moment. Her results vary from locket-sized contact prints to larger works on textured paper.
Often taking multiple years to create a single image, Westfall withdraws from familiar kinds of time—linear, colonial, wasted—to assemble a new, shared time. Her darkroom practice honors exploration and somatic timing over rigid clock-time and precision. The prints are baptized in water, or ice. Left out overnight to gather dewdrops, they cry, or sweat. And they feel pain—folded up and torn; pricked with a pin. Each intervention is an invitation to unfix the photograph and imagine it again. At last—which is not the end—what emerges is a recursive self-portraiture that embraces the unknowns and latent parallels of family lineage, opening itself through the interstices of the archive. On the shore, a figure glitters as light shines through it. Now, is the picture infinite?
Text by Genevieve Nollinger and Talia Markowitz
Photo by Kenzie Floyd.
On the occasion of Alex Westfall’s inaugural solo exhibition, Isolde published a companion risograph booklet. The publication includes poetry by Stella Rae Binion, critical writing by Marian Chudnovsky, personal essays by Kenzie Floyd and Selene Medina, flash fiction by Lauren Lee, and a conversation between Alex and her father Matthew. Designed by Tess Davey. Edited by Talia Markowitz, Genevieve Nollinger, and Alex Westfall. Printed at Colour Code in Toronto with a letterpress insert by Stella Rae Binion. Edition of 100.
See Through PDF
Featured in BOMB, Lifestyle Asia, Hyperallergic