Living Light No.1 comes out of a project that began in the summer of 2001, when I was given the opportunity to work briefly with Research Biologist Dr. Michael Latz at his bioluminescence research laboratory at the Scripps Institution Of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. My work as a whole focuses on the phenomenon of light, and so my interest at Scripps was to research and understand the nature of the single-celled marine organisms known as Dinoflagellates, which mysteriously give off their own light and make the ocean waters glow. The ultimate intention of my research was to develop a public ìliving installation of these organisms so that people might experience their beauty firsthand. Until that larger project can be realized, this digital print edition with Santa Fe Editions provides an ideal way for me to show the digital photographic documentation of these wondrous bioluminescence organisms, which I gathered during my time at Scripps.
The existence of Dinoflagellates in our oceans is unfortunately in grave danger of disappearing as earth's waters continue to become increasingly polluted. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this edition will be donated to the National Parks Conservation Association to aid in their plight to make 'Bioluminescent Bay' on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques a protected national park. For more information check out www.npca.org.

In September and October of 2004, Blumenfeld went to Marfa, Texas as Ballroom Marfa’s inaugural artist-in-residence. Through the generosity and non-financial support of the McDonald Observatory, Blumenfeld was granted the rare opportunity to work on site up on the main peak of the observatory in one of their astronomer’s houses. During her two-month stay, Blumenfeld created her very first video work, titled Moving Light: Lunation 1011.
Lunation is defined as the mean time between two successive new moons, and the corresponding lunation number is calculated beginning with the first new moon that occurred in the year 1923. Her piece, titled 1011 for the actual lunation cycle she documented, explores the waxing and waning of moonlight over a 30-day period, documenting an entire lunar cycle from new moon to new moon.
Imaged through an altered telescope and self-built recording devices, Blumenfeld documented the varying intensities of light radiating from the moon onto handheld photographic film. The resulting images portray not only the quantity of moonlight in its nightly phase, but also the artists own hand which, holding each piece of film over the long two-minute exposures, moved slightly from her own heartbeat and body’s subtle sway. The relationship between technology and the human implementing it is expressed in the completed video installation, where each of the exposures taken over the 30 days were animated in sequence to produce a 4-minute moving account of the lunar cycle. The viewer experiences the completed piece, which is the entire lunation cycle, as a mesmerizing shifting of light that slowly pulses, as if breathing, over time.

Lunation 1011 (30 Recordings) is a print edition based on the video installation Moving Light: Lunation 1011. The piece operates like a calendar of the 30-day lunar cycle, where each of the 30 recordings in the print is a one of the still images that comprise the video itself.

The “Scattered Light” project is a series of “free-art”, site-specific, community-engaged installations that artist Erika Blumenfeld creates in the various places where she exhibits. The first “Scattered Light” project was completed in Houston, Texas in 2004, and Santa Fe, New Mexico is the second location for the project. In this work, the artist invites the first 100 residents in the designated community who respond to an announcement of the project to choose an exact time (like 3:35pm, or 2:17am) during a predetermined 24 hours period. On that chosen day Blumenfeld exposes one piece of 4x5” Polaroid film to natural light (either sunlight or moonlight) at the exact moment requested by each participant. She then mails the Polaroid to the person who requested it, and the artwork became his or hers to keep. The installation itself, therefore, exists only as 100 light recordings dispersed throughout the community. The Polaroids are then mapped according to each address they were mailed to, and this map is re-envisioned by the artist to appear as a unique constellation of all the light recordings in exact relation to each other. This print becomes the only comprehensive visual documentation for each community-embedded “Scattered Light” project.

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