SEE WHAT
DEVELOPS: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF ELLEN CAREY
Looking at her work from 1996 to the present, it is easy to imagine Ellen Carey as a neomodernist painter taking cues from Jackson Pollock, bucket in hand, splashing oil and pigment into space and watching the trajectory of its flow. What one sees in her work' however, is not paint but light. "No.47" shows a row of vivid blocks of the primary colors yellow, red, green, and blue. Her first diptych, "No. 60 & 61", a breakthrough piece, uses Polaroid color film with a black and white palette- a white 20"x24" rectangle on the left with a swooping conical shape underneath and an all black right panel with the drip of unexposed Polaroid dyes, the absence of light and exposure. Carey hangs these oversized panels, arranged singley or in diptychs and triptychs, "in situ", push-pinned to gallery walls.
Carey is not a painter but a photographer. She explores the process of photography using the large format Polaroid 20"x 24" camera (an invention and a process) while pushing the boundaries of this contemporary art practice. She makes her pictures using the insides of this camera, exploring the mechanics of this tool that are inherently unique. Her photographs lay bare these processes through her formal and conceptual investigations while challenging our collective understanding of what a photograph is and how a picture gets made.
When one looks at her images they seem to defy what we already know about photography. "How did she make this picture?", a question about process, is now followed up with "What is this a picture of?", a question about representation. "My work is a departure from the picture sign idea of a photograph such as a snapshot, landscape, or journalism," says Carey. "These pictures physically are pure photography, like Talbot- light and process only in the late 20th century as opposed to the 19th. What they represent is a challenge to our previously prescribed historical and cultural expectation that a photograph will narrate, describe, and document."
This back-to-the future quality in Carey's work has affinities to 60's and 70's American abstraction and minimalism the repetition and simplicity of Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, the geometry and systems of Sol LeWitt's conceptual art, the color and light of Dan Flavin's sculpture, and the non-art materials & the square of Donald Judd. The geometric characteristics of the Polaroid camera and film inform Carey's work, which references the apparatus of the square/box of the camera and the circle/lens in front. The tenets of abstraction (size, scale, and off-frame space) and minimalism (materials-as-process, seriality, nonrepresentational images, and issues of silence) also underscore these photographs, allowing new meanings to be contemplated. Says Carey, "They [the photographs] don't tell you what they are or how they were made, leaving the viewer free to associate.
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| No 62/63/64 |
The less-is-more aesthetic is seen in the 1996 triptych No.62, 63 & 64", first shown at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery (NYC) in an exhibit Carey titled Photography Degree Zero, a reference to Roland Barthes book Writing Degree Zero. The three paneled piece represents the three. subtractive primary colors which constitute allphotographic color prints cyan, magenta, and yellow. In other works, Carey also uses the additive primaries of photography red, green, and blue. These images are not of things, but of pure light as it falls in front of the lens. The black drips, trails of unexposed dyes followed to depletion across the white receiving paper, are of various lengths controlled by the "gapping", a term used to describe the width of the rollers inside the camera back. Other telltale signs of the Polaroid process are the trademark "filigrees" usually found feathered at the top of each 20 x 24 print. Here we find them split down the length of the image, as in the yellow right panel in the triptych "No. 204", another variation on the subtracitve primary color theme. The watermelon/magenta middle panel contains a set of smaller filigrees at the top where photographer has "flared" the negative to allow for a subtle gradation from color to white. The cyan panel is asymmetrical, complementing the symmetry of the other two panels.
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| No 66 & 67 |
Size and scale play a dominant role in the extra long single-panel "No. 65". Here Carey stacks one combination of 20 x 24 red rectangle/ black conical shape on top of another in her first foray into very large work. In "No. 66 & 67" she later combines the primary colors of painting (yellow, red, and blue) with the additive primaries of photography (red, green, and blue) in a pair of 22" wide panels more than eleven feet high, hung approximately three feet apart. This piece represents another first for Carey, the "rollback". Each panel begins with a 20 x 24 rectangle of color which is partially rolled back into the camera, allowing the second exposure to overlap it by half. The area where the two dyes meet forms a patina of a muted shade, its surface no longer glossy but matte. This method/system continues through the exposure of the third and fourth colors, each frame rolled back by half, and ends with the signature black conical shape/drip which results from unexposed dyes being pulled through the rollers. The second panel reverses the color sequence of the first, and exhibits subtle differences in placement despite the consistent shooting method. The resulting pair of panels also represents the four elements: yellow/sun, red/fire, green/earth and blue/sky.
"She has taken her photography down a road where no one else has gone," says John Reuter, the director of the Polaroid 20 x 24 studio in New York City, who has worked with Carey since 1983. He adds that often three assistants are needed to feed the long sheets of paper back and forth through the 20 x 24 camera, fine tuning the exposures, lengths, overlays, and various other technical innovations the photographer has brought to her repertoire. One image may be pulled or rolled back three or four times, hence the title of her second exhibit, Pulls, a newlyminted term which echoes the gestalt of the picture making activity. "It is a painstaking process that involves selections and decisions throughout the several hours there is always an exciting element of the unexpected in Ellen's work".
In 1995, the unexpected element in Carey's work was tragically mirrored in her personal sphere with the death of her middle brother, an AIDS doctor who died suddenly in an accident unrelated to that illness. Six months later, in 1996, Carey's mother died from a terminal illness, leaving the photographer in a state of deep and profound grief. Since her father had passed away, also unexpectedly, in 1979, Ellen was left as one of four remaining siblings. The piece Family Portrailwas created as a "memento mori" of her recent twin losses, the loss of both parents, and the collective loss of what was once a family. Her poignant use of the Polaroid "negatives", a practice begun in this work, resulted in a piece consisting of seven panels, like tombstones all in a row, having a matte surface with a black hole-like patina which served as a metaphor for the deep, endless void of her loss. Carey states, "I set out to make a piece that would express my own profound grief, contain within it the visceral and visual equivalent of mourning, and document the presence of that which remains absent, a state often associated with bereavement". She created another version of this work in 1999 (a detail is shown here) using the "negatives" from the new black and white coaterless Polaroid film. The white surface encrustations more closely resemble the oxidation over time on an actual tombstone, as opposed to the earlier version's all-black void, for time had passed since the deaths.
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No.
78/79/80 |
As a counterpoint to this somber piece, Carey created the more playful triptych Birthday Portrait ("No.78, 79 & 80") combining the birth colors assigned to babies with their respective birthstones. Each birth color/ birthstone combination represented a deceased family member in the trio of losses: father/blue/oxbloodlMarch, mother/pinkJdiamond/April, and brother/blue/ ruby/July. Technically complex, distinctly symbolic (each family member died in close proximity to their birthdays), and narrative in content, this particular artwork celebrates, in the spirit of a birthday, the life cycles, the photographer's technical abilities and her conceptual underpinnings. Standing against the dark, starkly minimal Family Portrait, which reflected the photographer's melancholy state of mind, Birthday Portrait embraces the complexities of family life. Both use Polaroid material and the 20 X 24 camera with innovation and imagination.
While the
work of this period is different from her earlier Self Portrait series
(1983-1987), a group of images equally compelling, technically complex
and futuristic in their predating of digital compositing technologies,
her entire oeuvre has remained prescient and timeless. The geometric patterns
used as overlays in these self portraits find their source in the proportional
harmonies found in nature, science and mathematics. These images alter
our spatial perceptions while simultaneously referencing an ordered chaos,
observing symmetry and asymmetry, and using the "self" as a stand-in for
the individual, who accepts that he/she is a smaller interconnected unknowable
part of a larger universal whole.
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| No 42 |
The 20 X 24 camera allowed Ellen to build on what she was learning, " says John Reuter. "She could see immediately the results of her experiments with these multicolored portraits images shot, then refocused on and passed back through the camera with varying exposure times for the face and the graphic element. Getting the blend just right was always a delicate balancing act, technically difficult to achieve." .The bridge between the self-portraits and the later minimal work was a group of abstract experiments, shown here in "No.42". Four exposures were needed and the four primary colors were used. The result was the appearance of many colors rotating around in concentric circles the red and green combining to make yellow, the red and blue making magenta, the blue and green making cyan, and the layering of all four colors to create white. While literally not auto biographical, its saturated color palette and her use of the grid in some of the larger pieces are reminiscent of stained-glass windows, a reference to Carey's Catholic upbringing. All her work shows off the soft-edged brilliance of color particular to Polaroid dyes alone.
"I view myself as a late 20th century imagemaker, using the tools of her times for personal expression. More often than not, the tool in question is the large-format Polaroid 20" x 24" camera. It is in this spirit I have made a conscious decision to work in a medium in which a machine can combine with imagination to redefine notions of truth and beauty at 1/125 of a second," says Carey.
Ellen Carey lives and works in Hartford, CT and in New York City. She is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Photography at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in both one-person and group shows. Three mid-career surveys include The International Center of Photography (ICP) in 1987 and The Wadsworth