Liz Deschenes | Prototype for Gallery 7 (3), 2016 | max goelitz

2016

Medium

Silver toned black-and-white photograms mounted to aluminum in artist's frame

Dimensions

152.4 × 91.4 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-155964

Prototype for Gallery 7 (3) is a large-format photogram mounted onto a free-standing frame on an aluminum plate, thus functioning simultaneously as a photographic and sculptural object. Liz Deschenes explores the material potential of photography using the elementary aspects of the medium: photographic paper, light and chemicals. Deschenes' time-intensive work process begins by exposing light sensitive paper to the ambient light of the night, then washing and fixing it with silver toner. The resulting photograms bear fine, abstract traces of their creation process and, through their reflective surface, involve both the viewer encountering them and the spatial context of their presentation. As the material tends to oxidize, the works slowly develop further over time. The exhibition space thus becomes a camera, which, depending on the incidence of light, determine the alteration of the surface. In this way, Prototype for Gallery 7 (3) absorbs light and makes the material development of photography perceptible, while at the same time the object – like Stereograph #3, FPF #1 and FPF #5 – reacts to its surroundings by reflecting movement in time and space. Free-standing photograms of this series were part of the exhibition Gallery 7 (2015) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which showed the processual transformation of photograms exposed to light in various ways over the course of a year. Further parts of the series were also shown in a comprehensive solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2016.