NFS is made inside more than one hundred estate sales across Washington State, part of an American practice in which private homes are opened to the public, usually after a death. Items collected over a lifetime become public inventory, offered to strangers who move through unknown homes, picking things up and turning them over as if the answer might be on the other side.

NFS looks at the human need to orient ourselves in a world that does not come already explained. At the estate sale, objects, photographs, and rooms remain, but the person who gave them coherence is gone. Visitors construct an understanding of someone they never knew from what has been left behind. These accounts are always partial, shaped by the histories, assumptions, and associations each person brings to the encounter. Photography works in a similar way. A photograph holds part of a life and leaves the rest to whoever is looking. NFS asks why we construct these accounts at all, and why living without some sense of orientation is not something we can do.

The project uses straight photographs, assemblages, object typologies, and enlarged estate sale tags, each creating a different distance from the original site. Together, these modes follow the way objects and photographs shift as they move away from their original context. What begins as part of a life can end up as an image or a price, and each stage changes what can be known about it.

Often, what people are looking for, especially at estate sales, is something that cannot be purchased.