SHADOW ARCHIVE
By Lily Spitz
Book Launch: Sunday, November 22, 2026 from 1 - 4 PM
The Fulcrum Press
422 Ord Street, 2nd Floor
Los Angeles, California 90012
The light is famous in Los Angeles: dramatic, romantic, and fragrant. It’s light that provokes—sensorily and affectively. In Shadow Archive, Lily Spitz collects some of what this light has wrought: a tree cast atop a warm red wall, bits of foliage rendered wispy during a solar eclipse, a projection of a paned glass window, and undulations on cement or a shower curtain. Lily’s collection of shadows, captured in Los Angeles or during her travels, mark a practice of sustained attention to shifting light.
The recognizable shapes of ironwork, mums, a balloon, and floating croissant decals playfully imitate objects, held together by the absence of the sun that burns around them. These images evoke bits of narrative, and I want to indulge in the fantasy that these shapes are things that are telling a story. But when I imagine Lily making these pictures, she is in motion, in pursuit not of shapes or objects, but of that which is always just out of reach: an elusive certain slant of light, imperceptibly flickering, inching, diffusing. The shadows are playing tricks, and Lily knows how to play along.
—Kate Rouhandeh
