Isabel Horgan

MFA Painting

All the hours of light

In mid-February 2026 in downtown Providence, it rained on the mounds of melting snow; vaporizing pollutants compressed at ground level. When the snow was fresh, I watched from my studio window as heaps of blue road salt seeped into the snow along the sidewalks like blue raspberry syrup on a snow cone. Dogs walked past and relieved themself in the snow, cigarettes extinguished in the ice, and loads of other waste embedded into the piles of slush. There were two blizzards in the month of February, bookending the month. The first started to melt, inducing a fog, which was followed by a record breaking blizzard. The week of the second blizzard, trucks came into the city and drove as much of the snow as they could muster out of town. Mounds of snow that couldn’t fit in the trucks piled up at the edges of buildings, in parking lots, and alleys. Eventually, the excess snow melted, and all the debris revealed itself—on the sidewalk, in the vast parking lots, patches of yellowed grass, and in the air. It was foggy all day.

Fog, smog, smoke, and mist—these descriptors of murky atmosphere—activate the landscape. They allow it to become a complicated character, evading containment. Once the place on the other side of fog is reached, it moves further on, and on.