The desert is a place of both clarity and illusion. Its vast openness reveals everything, yet shifting light and atmosphere transform what is seen into something fleeting and elusive. I am drawn to these ephemeral moments: a rainbow appearing after a storm, clouds dissolving into endless sky, light bending across the horizon. They feel almost like a memory or mirage, real and present yet impossible to hold. My work is an attempt to slow down and linger with these moments, embracing both their beauty and their transience. Images of 22-degree halos, balloons drifting like constellations, and formations resembling pyramids, natural yet echoing the man-made, make me pause and question what I am seeing. These experiences take me outside of the everyday, reminding me that there is so much more to this life and this place than the hustle of my own experience. Each painting becomes both a record and an echo, not a direct representation of the landscape but a reflection of its temporality and mystery. Cataloguing the Ethereal brings together two perspectives on what cannot be easily contained. My contribution seeks to honor the desert as a space of wonder, where time stretches, boundaries blur, and the natural world reminds us of our own impermanence. In my work, I explore the ways we interact with our environment—how we form relationships with it and how those connections influence our interpretation of the world around us—what marks we leave behind, the experiences—intangible and manifest, and the action of moving through or being in a place. All of us have different places that we can claim to be our own because of our unique experiences there. The idea of place becomes much more internalized and individual. Memories and experiences, those things we carry with us, are projected onto the present landscape, our own personal maps and reference points. I am interested in liminal spaces, internal and external—spaces that are transitional and in-between, not quite here or there. Mirages and other light phenomena, states of meditation, suspended moments, and dream states all occupy this kind of territory. I manipulate the surface of the photograph through multiple exposures and layering to invite the viewer into a more personal and psychological experience of the space. Coming from a desert home, I have always been drawn to more desolate, inhospitable, and subtle landscapes—places that seem to only show themselves to those who spend time in them and seek out what they have to offer. For me, they invite introspection and reflection on the complexity of human-place relationships and our own internal-external manifestations of these relationships. I am particularly interested in mirages and other light phenomena as visual representations of the liminal spaces of these relationships.