Photo Objects by Richelle Forsey

On view from August 26th to October 4th

The work titled Photo Objects is a generative iteration of the subversive engagements of my Artifacts* works (artifacts of photochemical processes and light) - and is a rethinking on the conditions of photography. In this work I print digital scans onto large-scale transparency film and then each piece of film is further enhanced with mirror paint, layered, bent, folded, hung, curled, twisted, taped and/or glued to create sculptures.

The shapes of the Photo Objects are inspired by the structures of garden flora – that take their fantastical forms due to evolutionary history, environmental conditions, climate, and available light. The surfaces of the Photo Objects embody time, light, and technology; and reflect living in our contemporary capitalist modernity and the collapse of the natural world that the forms borrow their structure from.

What began as an investigation into material and chance operation has become a series of photographic objects that document my performative experiences with the materials; that operate as artifacts of analogue photographic processes; and blur the lines between sculpture and photography – challenging what the medium can be.

*The Artifacts series explores making images with photographic means and are the outcome of aleatory cameraless techniques in which I treat large-format, silver based, light-sensitive black and white sheet films burned with latent images, with unconventional methods and materials, chemistry, and light. A consequence of these techniques renders impermanent images that can only be captured through digital scanning that I then output as prints at 10 times the size.

Through this work that is labor intensive, these images operate in contradiction to the instantaneity of current photography and are an inquiry into the possibilities of photography in the contemporary moment bloated with commodified, ubiquitous, circulating images. They are ultimately intended to offer a place for contemplative wild imaginings and slow looking.