Re: Touch, the Arithmetics of Distance, 2020-present
About seven or eight years ago, while moving studios, some experimental tests of ink on film were filed, then forgotten in the shuffle. February 2020, I found them in a manilla envelope and, curious to see them for the first time, sent them to be scanned.
By mid-March, the Covid-19 Pandemic was, in devastating proportions, beginning to throttle NYC, preceded by Wuhan, China, Italy, and others. I got the scans back on March 15, a day after all NYC schools were closed by Governor Cuomo, and just as alarming numbers of sick and dying began to roll in.
I did not intentionally set out to make these images, so part of my fascination with this project has been with the strange alchemy of creativity itself. How something you begin years prior, can sit patiently, like a seed, until the right moment.
I am using antique-photo re-touching inks and analog slides. These inks are traditionally used to erase the flaws that can occur in analog photography - to touch up and create a perfect print. Here they are used in reverse - where the retouching ink is a stain or blotch. The process of dropping ink from a dropper onto these slides is not unlike testing for pathogens on treated medical slides. Put in place across the globe, social distancing has meant that we now cherish and ache for human touch more than ever. These images echo back, with uncanny prescience, this brave new world.
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The title borrows from a book of poetry by the feminist poet, Audre Lorde, “The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance.”