Kathy Lovas' current and ongoing project titled The Brainerd Album examines a group of images appropriated from an early 20th-century photo album kept by her grandparents, who lived in Brainerd, MN. Printed monochromatically via the DASS inkjet transfer process onto glass, the works are expressive of ideas about memory, ephemerality, surface tension, and references to early photographic processes, such as glass negatives and Cyanotype. The original album of 30 pages contains approximately 100 2x3" silver gelatin photographs taken by her uncle Thomas Walter Cleary of his immediate family, plus friends, pets, and significant buildings, such as the family home and neighborhood school. The glass prints are each presented leaning against a wall on a small support shelf to emphasize the work's 'object-ness' and fragility. A blank manila tag speaks to her ongoing interest in the idea of the archive.

The Brainerd Album project advances her career-long investigation into the ontology of photography. Freely moving between photography, sculpture, and installation, Lovas’s projects are based on narratives about current or historical events, memories from her early life, or familiar subject matter. All her projects examine photographic indexicality, the archive, and the frame.