In Kazem ongoing series Receiving Light (2016-), the artist lies in wait for the sun to sweep across a wall surface or bleed into a room. The artist photographically captures this luminous visitor, then applies his hallmark scratching technique, which he began in the 1990’s to render the light intensity tangible, as if he has somehow made nature analogue.

In 2018, while on residency in Cincinnati, Kazem continued to hunt down the elusive play of sunlight on walls that he randomly encounters. He photographed the architectural details and created abrasions into the paper’s surface with a pair of scissors pushing and pulling the blade against the paper, tearing and scratching the material in an effort to render sunlight visual. The raised and scattered dots of the textured image oddly echo the movement of this fleeting sun on its course. Materiality has been given to light, which had none; two dimensions have bristled into three.