In the warm afternoon light of a late spring day in 2019, I found myself at the top of a hill in the center of Prospect Park. Sunlight filtered through the leaves and branches of the canopy above me, spreading a golden dappled quilt on the ground below. In the distance, children chased each other with water guns, laughing and disappearing behind the trees, into the field below. I reached my hands out and saw the patterns of light on my hands, entranced for a moment by the shifting leopard-like spots, before a cloud passed above and they disappeared. From the earliest photographic plates to film to optical storage like CDs and DVDs, we have used light to capture a moment in time. But light remains ephemeral, capturable in a moment, that has already passed. Like those shadows slipping though my fingers in the park that day, we might reach for light, to try to capture it, only to have it slip through our fingers - or in the constantly shifting interplay of branches, leaves, sunshing, and clouds, it is never the same twice. In this project, light shines through multiple laters of leaves and trees in a humble attempt to recreate the unique and beautiful effect of dappled sunlight. Using programmitic modelling with grasshopper to create a variety of leaf layers and a branch layers, mixing both deterministic and random factors to create the each of the layers. A layer of branch images are sandwiched between two layer of leaf openings. The shadows and light cast below the light are evocative of standing under a forext canopy on a bright sunny day. While we each have memories of that dappled light, the associations are usually positive, with the naturalistic qualities have a calming and often quietly awe-inducing effect when you really look at them and notice. New tools and materials can come somewhat close to evoking the effect of dappled light, the paucity of layers, lack of birdsong or wind, there is still something uncanny and complete about this. In an age of rampant simulation, there are many ways that our efforts fall short of even the smallest natural phenomenon. As close as we think we get to mimicking nature. We might see the light on the skin of our hands, but we still don't feel the warmth of the natural rays. At best, the patterns can evoke a memory, unlocking a familiar feeling while creating their own, and reminding us of the ephemeral nature of memory and light - even as we feel it in the palms of our hands. The stand was created with bamboo dowels, assembled with 3d printed connectors. The leave and branch layer cutouts consist of lasercut 4-ply museum board.