Ethereal Echoes (2025)
Ethereal Echoes is a self-published photographic monograph that expands on R. J. Kern’s 2025 artist residency at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. Rooted in themes of memory, mortality, and transformation, the book chronicles the creation of forty camera-less silver-gelatin chemigrams made directly in response to the cemetery’s landscape. Wood, water, sunlight, and shifting atmospheric conditions become active collaborators, leaving unique traces on each print and underscoring the project’s embrace of impermanence.
Across 100 pages, Ethereal Echoes reflects a turning point in Kern’s mid-career practice—moving from portraiture and county-fair traditions toward a more introspective, process-driven approach. The work draws on the artist’s personal experiences of caregiving and family life, inviting readers to consider their own relationships to loss, remembrance, and renewal.
As an extension of the exhibition Ethereal Echoes at the Lakewood Cemetery Welcome Center, the book assembles images, reflections, and documentation that foreground the vulnerability and openness behind their making. Each copy includes a hand-selected, gold-toned silver-gelatin bookmark print, reinforcing the project’s commitment to the singular and the handmade.
Ultimately, Ethereal Echoes offers a contemplative visual narrative shaped by collaboration with the elements—a meditation on beauty, impermanence, and the quiet persistence of memory.
A video documentary by R. J. Kern fuses philosophy with photographic chemistry to create art. Drawing on teachings of impermanence and rebirth, Kern employs Chromoskedasic techniques – altering silver gelatin prints to produce shimmering, mirror-like surfaces reminiscent of 19th-century daguerreotype reflecting rhythms of life, death, and renewal. Through organic forms shaped by light and alchemy, this series invites viewers to pause and reflect on the cycles that connect us.
Music: Sarah M. Greer; Framing Millwork: Jessica Nelson; Video Editing: Independence Barnes
Ethereal Echoes solo exhibition at Lakewood Welcome Center, 40 unique silver gelatin chemigrams, gold-toned float mounted on museum board with artist frames made from reclaimed wood at Lakewood Cemetery (Minneapolis, MN), July 15 - Sept 1, 2025.
Ethereal Echoes solo exhibition at Lakewood Welcome Center, 40 unique silver gelatin chemigrams, gold-toned float mounted on museum board with artist frames made from reclaimed wood at Lakewood Cemetery (Minneapolis, MN), July 15 - Sept 1, 2025.