2026 To Remain Series

We’re going through a process. We’re building a ship as we sail it. We’re steadying the ship. We’re a sinking ship.

Through photography, I have explored the emotional and physical aftermath of disruption. This project revolves around the October 2024 flood in Roswell, New Mexico. While the photographs were taken post-flood, there’s an uneasy commingling with pre-flood scenarios. Are these images of incomplete memories or the dreams of disturbed sleep? Temporal categorization is indistinguishable, as are the boundaries between the spaces of home and work, the remediated museum and storage.

The visual strategies employed here derive from two other, older, ongoing photography projects. Details is a series that presents excessively zoomed-in minutiae of daily life untethered from context. Social Boundaries presents a visual survey of barrier structures on doors, windows, and other passageways. This project inherits the unsettling ambiguity of Details and the numb, taxonomic certainty of Social Boundaries.

Rather than documenting events directly, this series of photographs focuses on what it means to remain: to survive; to stay unchanged; to persist over time; to resist change; to be unfinished or pending; to stay when others leave; to continue in someone’s possession or memory; to continue being somewhere instead of leaving; to stay behind; to still be available after part has been used, removed, or taken away; to still exist after other things have disappeared, changed, or ended.

What do you do when you’re unsuccessful in coming to a conclusion? When you see the door ajar ahead that you can’t shut and can’t walk through. When you seek the relief of closure that’s continuously out of reach. When the questions outlast the answers.

How are you? When’s the museum reopening? How’s life in Roswell? Can I be let in? Do you work here? Where are you? Are you an artist too? When was the flood? What are you doing tomorrow? Can you lock me out? What are you working on? How long have you been in Roswell? What’s the value? What are you doing with all your free time? When will we have our going away party? Are you on your way? What are you spending all your money on? Why is it taking so long? Are you feeling better? How will you be paying? Where are we going? Are you still here? Why aren’t they paying for it? What’s the point?

The images are composed in such a way that not everything is fully visible. The hard edges of doors, windows, frames, structures, containers, paths, floors, mindsets, futures are cut off abruptly. There’s an unresolved tension between here and there, yesterday and tomorrow, private and public, inside and outside. The flood becomes both event and condition: something that happened, and something ongoing. The depression and isolation existed before the flood and remain.

© 2026 Aaron Wilder. All rights reserved.