2025
PENUMBRA'S SKIN
Site-specific installation (Theater light, uranium glass slab, slab holder, motorized base)Installation: Various
Penumbra’s Skin is a site-specific installation set within an abandoned building in Baltimore. A slow-moving spotlight, mounted at chest height on a motorized pedestal, rotates in a straight path across the large space. Positioned in front of the beam is a thick slab of uranium glass—an early 20th-century material once prized for its luminous green glow. As the beam filters through the glass, it casts a radioactive hue across the room, illuminating fragments of the past: discarded signage, mic stands, umbrellas, a plastic flamingo, and a green hazmat suit slumped in one corner.
The light brushes across the columns, throws long shadows, and eventually lands on the viewer. Though they remain outside the installation—barred from entering—the sweeping beam makes contact, briefly touching their skin, and then their eyes, leaving a ghostly afterimage. The viewer becomes both witness and participant, marked by light.
The uranium glass at the center of Penumbra’s Skin casts an otherworldly green hue, filtering the spotlight into something both beautiful and ominous. Once popular between the 1880s and 1920s as decorative glassware, uranium glass was admired for its uncanny glow under UV light. The slab used in this work likely originated as raw bulk material, never formed into domestic objects. After 1945, all uranium—including that used in glass production—was seized by the U.S. government, its aesthetic use eclipsed by its role in the atomic age.
Here, that history is refracted—literally and metaphorically. The glowing glass is no longer an object of beauty or utility, but a relic of a turning point in human history: the moment uranium was transformed from household novelty to instrument of mass destruction. By positioning the viewer outside the installation, unable to intervene, Penumbra’s Skin underscores the paradox of witnessing—seeing without touching, knowing without undoing.
The space hums with a low, unsettling drone composed of layered nuclear warning sirens. As the spotlight sweeps, it not only reveals, but implicates—creating a rhythm of dread, absence, and distorted time. The four support columns in the room offer moments of total darkness, where the light cannot reach, suggesting that some truths remain buried.
Set only 38 miles from Washington, D.C. and within the 55 mile nuclear fallout zone, Penumbra’s Skin hovers between past and possible futures. It is both an aftermath and a warning—an irradiated mirror held up to the present, where the consequences of light, power, and silence still unfold.
2025
PENUMBRA'S SKIN
Site-specific installation (Theater light, uranium glass slab, slab holder, motorized base)
Installation: Various
Penumbra’s Skin is a site-specific installation set within an abandoned building in Baltimore. A slow-moving spotlight, mounted at chest height on a motorized pedestal, rotates in a straight path across the large space. Positioned in front of the beam is a thick slab of uranium glass—an early 20th-century material once prized for its luminous green glow. As the beam filters through the glass, it casts a radioactive hue across the room, illuminating fragments of the past: discarded signage, mic stands, umbrellas, a plastic flamingo, and a green hazmat suit slumped in one corner.
The light brushes across the columns, throws long shadows, and eventually lands on the viewer. Though they remain outside the installation—barred from entering—the sweeping beam makes contact, briefly touching their skin, and then their eyes, leaving a ghostly afterimage. The viewer becomes both witness and participant, marked by light.
The uranium glass at the center of Penumbra’s Skin casts an otherworldly green hue, filtering the spotlight into something both beautiful and ominous. Once popular between the 1880s and 1920s as decorative glassware, uranium glass was admired for its uncanny glow under UV light. The slab used in this work likely originated as raw bulk material, never formed into domestic objects. After 1945, all uranium—including that used in glass production—was seized by the U.S. government, its aesthetic use eclipsed by its role in the atomic age.
Here, that history is refracted—literally and metaphorically. The glowing glass is no longer an object of beauty or utility, but a relic of a turning point in human history: the moment uranium was transformed from household novelty to instrument of mass destruction. By positioning the viewer outside the installation, unable to intervene, Penumbra’s Skin underscores the paradox of witnessing—seeing without touching, knowing without undoing.
The space hums with a low, unsettling drone composed of layered nuclear warning sirens. As the spotlight sweeps, it not only reveals, but implicates—creating a rhythm of dread, absence, and distorted time. The four support columns in the room offer moments of total darkness, where the light cannot reach, suggesting that some truths remain buried.
Set only 38 miles from Washington, D.C. and within the 55 mile nuclear fallout zone, Penumbra’s Skin hovers between past and possible futures. It is both an aftermath and a warning—an irradiated mirror held up to the present, where the consequences of light, power, and silence still unfold.
© 2023 by Kei Ito.
Created on Editor X.
Sungazing
2015 - Ongoing
108 of 8”x10” prints, Scroll: 12” x 150’ to 220’ depending on the edition
On August 6th 1945, at 8:15 AM, my grandfather witnessed a great tragedy that destroyed nearly everything in Hiroshima. He survived the bombing, yet he lost many of his family members from the explosion and radiation poisoning. As an activist and author, my grandfather fought against the use of nuclear weaponry throughout his life, until he too passed away from cancer when I was ten years old. I remember him saying that day in Hiroshima was like hundreds of suns lighting up the sky.
In order to express the connection between the sun and my family history, I have created 108 letter size prints and a 200 foot long scroll, made by exposing Type-C photographic paper to sunlight. The pattern on the prints/scroll corresponds to my breath. In a darkened room, I pulled the paper in front of a small aperture to expose it to the sun while inhaling, and paused when exhaling. I repeated this action until I breathed 108 times. 108 is a number with ritual significance in Japanese Buddhism; to mark the Japanese New Year, bells toll 108 times, ridding us of our evil passions and desires, and purifying our souls.
If the black parts of the print remind you of a shadow, it is the shadow of my breath, which is itself a registration of my life, a life I share with and owe to my grandfather. The mark of the atomic blast upon his life and upon his breath was passed on to me, and you can see it as the shadow of this print.