Digital cameras and smart phones have turned us all into photographers or rather into photograhic voyeurs: we have grown so accustomed to take several high resolution images a day that some of us have started looking at the world through the screens of their mobile phones. Yet there are artists out there trying to look at different visions of our world, one of them is Canadian-born Jessica Eaton.
The recipient of numerous awards including Photo District News' 30 New and Emerging Photographers (2013), the Hyères Photography Jury Grand Prize (2012) and the Foam International Photography Magazine Talent Call (2011), Eaton has been using a range of analogue-based techniques – colour separation filtration, additive colour theory, multiple exposures, motion blur, in-camera masking, cross polarisation and lighting techniques – to create unique geometrical visions.
"Ad Infinitum", her debut UK exhibition that opened last week at The Hospital Club in London, introduces art and photography fans to her world through new works from her series entitled "Cubes for Albers and LeWitt (cfaal)", which she started developing four years ago. This series features geometrical figures in a kaleidoscopic array of colours.
Despite the pictures may look as if they had been made with the help of a computer, there is nothing digital about them. They are indeed the clever result of Eaton's experiments: the bright shades we see in her pictures do not really exist, but she obtains them through the additive colour process.
Eaton makes real cubes, paints them in silvery nuances of grey or bright white, and shoots them over the same negative applying different coloured filters on the lenses, playing with the camera and the light in the same way a painter may play with colours.
"Ad Infinitum" is the perfect title for this exhibition since you easily get the impression of getting dizzy or simply lost in Eaton's architecturally three-dimensional brightly coloured constructions that at times look as if they were composed of many complex layers of different hues and shades.
Eaton's images confuse human perceptions, bringing a new level of abstraction into photography and calling to mind the works of László Moholy-Nagy and his experimental multiple images, photomontages and constructions of transparent materials that allowed him to play with the notions of tangible and non-material forms.
"Ad Infinitum" is at The Hospital Club, London, until 8th February 2014. The Photographers’ Gallery will also present Eaton’s "cfaal 312" as part of its Touchstone programme until 4th February 2014.
Image credits
All images in this post Copyright Jessica Eaton
1. cfaal 346, 2013
2. cfaal 306, 2013
3. cfaal 322 (B study), 2013
4. cfaal 324 (Y study), 2013
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