About a year ago I made a piece (Untitled, 2013) by dipping fifty exposed sheets of photographic paper into chemical fixative and hanging them, frieze-like, to fit the wall space of a gallery. Their unfixed sensitivity allowed them to develop over the course of the show. The pieces darkened more or less in relation to their proximity to natural light; their edges curled when it rained and relaxed when the humidity passed. They took on a life of their own, turning colours and shapes that were out of my control, judgment, even my desire. Presently that work lives as a stack in a box, protected from light and further development.
This marks the second iteration of the project. Untitled (2014): twenty-three dips, each sheet existing discretely. Yet the same thoughts and questions persist. The paper is an alchemized material, a neutral surface formulated to be predictable, consistent, subservient. Can this mute fixity shift? I imagine a slippery space in between this and some other undefined point, a site where material is self-expressive and up for collaboration. Where surface is actually a skin—sensitive, permeable, individual, ever becoming.
My favorite scene, in which the ghosts of several famous murderers return from hell to visit a cat’s birthday party in a crumbling Brooklyn brownstone.
