Framed Print of "Lifting Spaces, Ultramarine"

Lifting Spaces
Archival inkjet print, 13 × 19 in., front-loaded frame

Photographed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lifting Spaces renders the museum’s stairwell as pure architectural geometry — a high-contrast duotone of cobalt and white in which depth, shadow, and structure collapse into a single graphic plane.

The title operates on two registers. In topology, a covering space “lifts” a base space into a higher structure that circles back on itself — the same territory, traversed from a new vantage. Pao reads art history the same way: not as linear progression but as a series of returns, each pass through familiar subject matter arriving from a different context, a different elevation. The stairwell, with its recursive landings and doubled railings, makes that logic visible.