There is a persistent cultural mythology around the blue sky — that it signifies openness, freedom, the absence of obstruction. We have encoded this symbolism so deeply into our visual language that it operates beneath conscious thought. A clear sky means safety. It means the world, at this moment, is as it should be.
This mythology does not survive contact with history.
Above It All is a long-form archival and artistic inquiry into this dissonance — between the sky as cultural symbol and the sky as passive witness to atrocity. The work proceeds archive by archive, beginning with the federal evidence files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation: thousands of photographs entered into public court record, accessible to anyone, examined by almost no one.
Custom software was used to isolate every pixel of blue sky across the archive, removing everything else — faces, locations, objects, context — and preserving only the sky and the document identification numbers assigned by the federal court. The imprecision of the algorithm was not corrected. Incompleteness, in this context, is not a flaw. It is a formal position. Every institution that encountered this material made similar choices about what to process completely and what to leave unresolved.
What remains is neither evidence nor its absence, but something in between: the atmospheric residue of documented events. Five hundred fragments of sky, each anchored to a federal record number, each present at something the public has largely been permitted not to think about.
Some of what the software identified as sky was not sky at all. Painted ceilings — blue, cloud-streaked, designed to evoke openness — were present in several of the properties documented in the archive. The algorithm could not tell the difference, and in this case, neither can we. That Epstein surrounded himself with manufactured sky, with the aesthetic of freedom and innocence rendered in pigment on interior ceilings, is not a footnote to this project. It is close to its center. The simulation of blue sky inside spaces where harm was done is among the most precise illustrations of what this work is trying to say: that the iconography of innocence has never guaranteed it, has in fact always been available for purchase by those with enough to spend.
The sky in these images carried no meaning when the photographs were taken. Whether it carries meaning now — whether context is sufficient to corrupt something as vast and indifferent as the open sky — is the question this work refuses to answer on your behalf. Look at the images. Decide what you see.
Daniel Koeth, 2026
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Operates the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline. Works to disrupt the networks that enable trafficking and provides direct support to survivors navigating complex systems.
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