"Iterations (III)”
Higher Pictures, New York
Oct. 19 to Nov. 30, 2019
Jessica Eaton/Handout
Believe it or not, the vivid picture you’re looking at is actually just grey squares. It’s hard to explain. Even the creator of the image – Montreal-based photographer and 2019 Guggenheim fellow Jessica Eaton, whose solo exhibition Iterations (III) is on view at Higher Pictures in New York until Nov. 30 – finds it tricky to break down the technically exacting, obsessive and idiosyncratic process that she invented to make her signature optical tricks. “My short and confusing answer is that I take analog photographs of things you can’t see,” she says.
That’s right, analog. There’s no digital manipulation at play here. Rather, Eaton paints wooden cubes in tones of grey, then shoots them repeatedly on one sheet of film, precisely and incrementally adjusting filters and exposures as she goes to perform a kind of alchemical magic, making a grisaille palette trip over the rainbow into a technicolour dimension that flickers and hums. The most annoying response the artist receives about her work is, “Why wouldn’t you just make this in Photoshop?”
The whole point is that it’s done painstakingly by hand. Look closely, and you get a glimpse behind the curtain: subtle, tiny imperfections still present, in the form of texture, blurring or brushstrokes. “The work is a conversation between an imagined ideal and the forces of the universe pushing on the attempt to get there,” Eaton says. “The imperfections are the life of the work and an influence outside of my own ideal. In a big, metaphoric way, I hope the work serves as a reminder that there is always more than meets the eye, and untapped possibility in everything.”
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