I’ve been making photographic collages with hopeful and positive imagery as a response to the challenges and darkness the world has faced this past year. They are composed of personal snapshots from a diversity of sources and time periods and combined into single unified forms. There is a cake, a blue sky, and a bouquet of flowers, among other idealized imagery. These new unified images are held together on an invisible grid that references both the ancient Mesopotamian mosaic and the modern photographic pixel. Cutting a photograph into fragments disassociates the image from its context, rendering it more material than image. In this framework, I am curious to explore the question, how can the materials of the past reframe our understanding of the present?