Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg

Limited Edition: $2400.00

From the series: Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg

Year of completion: 2018-19
Medium: Unique gelatin silver photogram (fixed) on expired Agfa Brovira paper
Print size: 12x16"
Signed and dated on verso by the artists
From a selection of 13 unique pieces
Including a signed copy of the book

A small selection from the almost 200 unique photograms Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Odette England made in Robert Rauschenberg's swimming pool (using expired chemistry and vintage gelatin silver paper found in his darkroom) during their collaboration at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida.

For a complete description of this book project, please click HERE

Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all
the civilizations the moon has seen passing by…
— Omar Khayyam, 11th-century mathematician and poet

Thirty-Six Views of the Moon is a meditative collection of nighttime exposures. For this project, Ebtekar found and tore out pages from volumes spanning the last thousand years—ranging from poetry and science fiction to religious texts and philosophy—that reference the moon and night sky. He then worked with a photographic glass plate negative of the moon from the Lick Observatory archives in Northern California, treating each book page with Potassium ferricyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate to make their surfaces light-sensitive. Finally, Ebtekar would leave the sheets outside from dusk until dawn, using the UV-light emitted by the moon to create a contact cyanotype print layered with the cosmological texts on the found book pages.

In addition to the thirty-six cyanotypes, this volume features essays by Kim Beil, Alexander Nemerov, and Ladan Akbarnia, as well as an annotated index for this selection of images and a comprehensive bibliography of sources Ebtekar has used throughout the various iterations of this project.

I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.

— Stephanie Syjuco

The Unruly Archive is Syjuco’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is "a type of forensics...what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive."

By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images.

Now Rare: $150

… pure, seductive standalone images that eliminate the photographed subject.

– Nadia Vellam, T Magazine

“In honor of Anna Atkins who was the first person to illustrate a book with photographs, I have produced Compendium 1898–1919, a chronology of twelve assemblages made from the earliest expired photographic papers in my collection. The exact expiration dates of these papers pinpoint their location on a timeline and coexist with events in world history. No matter what the light-sensitive materials have endured through dormant years, they still respond to chemical development, and the resulting photographic tones are evidence of experience. Physical damage, moisture, and mold produce tonal changes when developed, and I consider these effects to be subject matter.” – Alison Rossiter

This book, a co-publication with the New York Public Library and Yossi Milo, includes all twelve works from the series at actual scale, along with close-up details, photographed by Peter Riesett, Head Photographer, Digital Imaging Unit, New York Public Library. The reference dates, which cover world events such as World War II and the sinking of the Titanic, and art-historical references such as the founding of the Bauhaus, are included as a reference key in the back of the book.

West's poignant commentary on the ever-accelerating culture of urban renewal feels urgent in this particular moment when city life as we once knew it is changing suddenly in the blink of an eye.

– Olivia Gauthier, The Brooklyn Rail

This debut monograph brings together nearly a decade of “analogital” experiments in film, sculpture, and installation by one of the most committed artists working on the West Coast today. Saturated in a history of avant-garde and Third World cinema (and HIV/AIDS activism and the incipient Riot Grrrl movement) since she was an undergraduate at Evergreen State College, West’s work today treads similar ground: challenging the utopianism of new media adoptees as well as the nostalgia of analog-only film adherents.

The eleven projects reproduced in the book, all produced between 2014 and 2020, fall under the heading of Media Archeology, and reveal the historical and material promiscuity of West’s experiments in film and art, often tied to the changing geography of Los Angeles and its surrounds. The monograph includes an interview with Stuart Comer, Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA, New York, and essays by Norman Klein, critic, novelist, and urban and media historian, Andy Campbell, art historian, critic and curator, and Chelsea Weathers, art historian and managing editor at Radius Books.

For information about the limited edition, please see the page HERE.