C. Meier
As an artist who delights in experimentation and process, I am intrigued by photography’s materiality—of light, chemistry, and paper—and its inherent reality as object. Pushed (2020) is an ongoing series of unique Polaroids made by hand pushing the chemical onto the film’s surface in total darkness. In this series I am concerned with what happens to the film’s surface when the chemical is applied without the assistance of light. I am interested in challenging the traditional viewpoints of how photo-sensitive material and representation function in photography. By eliminating the camera and working strictly with the material itself, these images lose the object referent and become, as a photograph, the object itself. The works in this series are not of something, they are something. They become a self-reflexive meditation.
My approach embraces unknowns and unpredictability. I begin with a semi-controlled method for making the photographs: the film must be immersed in total darkness when the chemical makes contact and hand pushed using printmaking tools or the roller mechanism removed from a Polaroid camera. I may make one pass or multiple passes, different levels of pressure are employed, and the film may or may not have been exposed to light beforehand. Beyond these measures, it is left up to the materials and chance to decide the final outcome of the photograph.
What becomes evident is that when materiality is harnessed—the absence and presence of light, chemistry, color, and form—a photographic reality of its own can be made visibly tangible and expressively deployed.