Language Acquisition: Gestures (2015 – present)

 

After my first few years of studying photography in the late 1990’s, I began to shy away from the darkroom. Silver gelatin prints were the standard in the photographic world, and quickly becoming unsatisfying to me. I wished to see the physical mark in my work, and to create objects. Photography as I knew it felt mass-produced and devoid of this materiality.

Once digital photography became the standard, the darkroom lured me back, as the tables had turned and a silver gelatin print presented itself to me as an object. Chemigrams became a natural progression for me to explore photographic paper as a physical medium unto itself, rather than simply the substrate upon which an image taken from the outside world rests. The application of a resist on silver gelatin paper, and my instinctual and immediate drawing gestures I create on the paper, satisfies the missing mark of the artist that I had found to be lacking in photography.

As I continue to create Gestures over the last 10+ years, they have evolved as my way to address unease with the negative effects of American society’s increasingly digitized existence. I witness younger generations who have challenges with mechanical tasks that I take for granted. Doomscrolling and dopamine rewards are pervasive. Even as education adapts to online offerings and offers positive outcomes, I grow apprehensive as many artmaking mediums are frequently tied to equipment and facilities that are being eliminated.

By making direct marks on light-sensitive photographic materials, I call for a reconnection to materiality and in-person interaction. My gestures reflect various mental states as I contemplate these issues, from quiet and content to frustrated and loud. Their ambiguous resemblance to letterforms references my difficulty in communicating such a widespread societal matter. The chemigram process itself, with its endless variables and lack of fully- controlled outcomes, celebrates the rare sense of mystery and awe that our constantly digitally-connected world robs from us, fueling an epidemic of anxiety.