Shadows / Silhouettes as described by Rod Val Moore

Once, in the course of a long hike in the desert, nearly defeated by the August heat, I trudged on, needing to get to water, to shade, to my car. All the time I found myself keeping one eye on my shadow as it followed me faithfully across the ground, and after a while I began, in my pain, to wonder — might my shadow and I trade places? Could I take on his darkness, flatten myself into a cool silhouette, and could he, not me, become fleshy and thirsty and exhausted?

It was a moment when the boundary between thing and shadow-of-thing fluctuated, danced, and these are exactly the kinds of moments — striking and unnerving glimpses of moments — that I see in the photographs of Ave Pildas. The intimate black and white world he conjures here draws us into the uncanny marriage of bright bodies and night-black shadows, always in ghostly but intimate contact, one to the other, the other to the one. Pildas’ shadows, like those moving across the walls of Plato’s cave, question our satisfaction with the truth of our casual perceptions. Finally, for me, they bring to mind the richly ephemeral nature of our world, and the human lightness and darkness we forever contribute to it.

—Rod Val Moore is the author of “A History of Hands” and “Brittle Star”