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I grew up hearing the whir, flutter, and occasional clunk of my father’s slide projector in the dining room as he practiced lectures about his latest medical research. To my father, the slide carousel was a trove of precise data, but to me the impression was entirely aesthetic, a sort of mystical veil of eerie blue light punctuated with inscrutable signs, equations, and microscopic details. In my memory, all these translucent images combine, as if layered on top of one another in some infinite palimpsest.

Jesse Albrecht is at home with unsettling thoughts. Since completing military service in Iraq, he has struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2019, he spent seven weeks in an inpatient trauma recovery unit at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Montana. That space is depicted in the vase Room 200, produced the following year, which represents both a psychological and artistic breakthrough for the artist.