Crush_&_ Ding (2019)

Crush & Ding combines Polaroid and photogram using the Polaroid negative to create new abstract forms and blended hues with experimental approaches and innovative process-driven methods located in: chemistry-laden Polaroid pods and the light-tight color darkroom. Here, Polaroid’s 20th century instant technology meets the wonder of 19th century photograms.

Crush & Ding links my photographic experiments in color with process, minimalism and abstraction, light and its variations, often with zero exposure, uniting my twin practices Struck by Light and Photography Degree Zero for the first time. Crush & Pull bridges ideas from my own photograms, its history and practitioners to ideas in Polaroid, instant technology's history and those practitioners. My project revisits the negative, rich in -- metaphor, object, picture ‘sign’ -- that delivers a whole new approach to picture making, underscored in -- concept, context, content -- with a unique, new photographic object that has never been seen or done before.

The history of the ‘shadow’ in art is cited in photogram, a paper negative (1834) contact printed for its positive (1840). Polaroid 20 X 24 (circa 1980s) makes a large negative transferring it in development to make the positive (www.20X24Studio.com) in a one-step, peel-away process, a large contact print in 60 seconds. The negative-to-positive duality, the foundation in all photography, is similar in photogram and Polaroid processes; I am the only Polaroid artist to keep and exhibit the negatives. In current discourse, the negative is often forgotten, remaining “hidden”, a means to an end, a document, its ‘picture sign’ in portrait, landscape, still life, figure.