Ellen Curry pushes the boundaries of photography – ARTnews.com

Eileen Curry spent the summer of 1988 in her darkroom trying to answer a question that was bothering her: “What is an abstract image?” Her experiments continued to fail – she processed 120 black and white films with different shapes and lighting, made black and white photos, sprayed and sprayed coating chemicals on various papers.

Then, one day, I developed an image that contained nothing. “She only takes one picture when she’s struggling,” says Carrie. It was gradient, going from white on the left to black on the right. The work is essentially a whiteboard image, although it doesn’t necessarily appear that way. “It was all about the light,” she said.

Since then, Curry has focused on pushing the boundaries of what can be done with photographic equipment and materials. This ongoing project continues with her latest collection of work, a series of images that the artist has dubbed “Finitograms”. Debuting in a Solo exhibition at Galerie Miranda in Paris (On display until June 22), the series name is a reference to infinite The method used by Donatello and Michelangelo, who, in some cases, deliberately not carved all the marble blocks they used.

Completely finished, however, Curry’s photographs are 8″ x 10″ photographic sheets with traces of chemicals on them – from the experiences of Curry’s students to the leftover marks from being thrown in the trash. “The idea here is light and chemistry without the intervention of the human hand,” she says. For the past 20 years or so, Carrie has been collecting and storing them—”time is the camera’s trigger,” she says.

According to Miranda Salt, director of Galerie Miranda, Carrey’s work largely blurs genre lines.

“It’s ultra-high-resolution photography with a strong connection to the world of painting,” Salt said. In its estimation, French institutions have long focused on figurative photography, and are thus about five years behind the United States. And I assumed that was why they were just starting to get into Carrie’s job.

Carrie’s most famous series is a compilation of large-scale, adult-sized works made up of gleaming dots of color and chipped paint. Manufactured using 20×24 Polaroid cameras, it weighs 235 pounds and requires its own wheeled tires. It’s so big that two people are needed to move it – and often to work -.

Carrie uses the camera to take a picture, then moves the film into a dark room with no light at all (I used a locker while closed). There, the paper, with its hand-attached negative, clumps before revealing the final work. She sometimes includes the negative as part of the job, too.

This body relates to Carrey’s obsession with surrealism. Decades of playing in a darkroom gave her the confidence to effectively damage the film, breaking one of the big photographic taboos.

Carey owns one of seven 20×24 Polaroid cameras (a new one is currently being built) in the Hartford, Connecticut studio, which was used by photographer Elsa Dorfman until her death two years ago. When Polaroid announced that it would no longer manufacture the film, 20×24 Holdings, which helps operate some of these cameras, purchased more than 500 boxes of film. However, since no financier has been found yet, Carey estimates that there are enough films for a few more years. Although Carrie is undoubtedly the only one to act in this abstract manner with this camera, there is a possibility that it will be the latter as well.

While Carrey has continued to expand the field of abstract photography over the past three decades, creating entirely new genres, it has not gained the same level of appreciation as some of her contemporaries. For example, she was friends with Cindy Sherman when they were in college in Buffalo, New York, and they had a joint exhibition in 1976 on the Buffalo City Bus.

Carey was first introduced to the Polaroid 20×24 camera in 1983, when she was invited to be part of the Polaroid Artists Support Program—which ended in the great stock market crash in 1987.

“The camera made me rethink the way I work,” she said, explaining that she knew she wasn’t very good at drawing, painting or other figurative ways of making art. This can be seen in Carey’s “zerograms”, for which she folds Fuji Crystal paper (a process similar to “Crush & Pulls”), then manipulates it in a dark, lightless room and exposes it to a melange of bright color.

These styles were spotted by the creative design team behind menswear brand Dunhill, which collaborated with her on some of the pieces from the Spring Summer 2022 collection. Dunhill’s creative director, Mark Weston, said Carrey’s work held the “importance of innate confidence while embracing accidents” that resonated with the design team, describing how the “graphic colors” lend themselves well to printing on silky satin.

Carrie thinks of her exercise in a similar way. She said her work is about “the introduction of randomness and chance,” sometimes with the intervention of the human hand, sometimes without it.