Forum Gallery at Summit Artspace, July 12- September 14, 2024
Evocative of watery depths, imaginary heavens, and mysterious maps, the large-scale photograms and drawings on view in this exhibition create an immersive world examining the intersection of symbols, surrealism, and abstraction. Like dreams, these images seem familiar but weird; letters that don’t exist, mechanical forms floating in space, math problems that don’t add up, and patterns that follow their own logic.
Diagrams for Inner Space was a culmination of a body of work and the motifs that had inhabited that work. These works start out as drawing—simple mark-making and freely associated forms—drawn from the subconscious, vague memories, and shared visual history. Recurring patterns echo gears and gaskets, commas and ellipses, letter-like formations, radiation, single cells, and collapsed stars, and assemble like blueprints for strange mechanisms or star charts for a mysterious space.
The pieces in this exhibition are very large in scale for the medium; most being approximately 60” x 40”. Customized darkroom facilities were created to accommodate rolls of 40” wide silver gelatin photo paper, including an exposure table with a timer controlled light source, and large troughs to hold several gallons of developer and fixer at a time. For the cyanotypes, a flatbed cart fitted with plywood and acrylic was created to wheel giant cyanotypes out into the sun for exposure, and then back to an oversized darkroom sink for washout.
The exhibition included unique cameraless photograms, drawings, collage, and photogram/drawing hybrids. Highlights below:
