by Adriana Grant
Three disparate artists showed very nearly identical work in Seattle recently, all comprised of folded paper photographs. Tauba Auerbach’s pastel-tinted, poster-sized works were on view at Western Bridge in July, part of their New Year exhibitions, and are on view again, though October 30. Auerbach’s folded pieces are reminiscent of Oscar Tuazon’s bright white folded paper works, seen at Seattle Art Museum in 2007 as part of his Betty Bowen Award exhibition. Isaac Layman, who won the Betty Bowen the following year, also works in folded photographs, gorgeously minimal things, measuring 8 ½ by 11 inches. Layman’s are collected in plastic sleeves in a binder at Lawrimore Project You have to know they exist to ask for them.
The works themselves, putting aside scale and color, are very, very similar. Each piece is about folds, and the light and shadow cast by the paper itself. In folding paper, two dimensions become three, while light and dark record and display this fact. The paper is, most importantly, not plain paper, but photographic paper: all three artists are working, predominantly, with light. The paper is at once medium and matter.
Auerbach, based in New York and San Francisco, works in paint, etching, and photography, while both Tuazon, who divides his time between Tacoma and Paris, and Layman, a Seattle artist, are photographers who have recently been experimenting with installation and sculpture. All three artists’ folded works exist as photographs whose creases are both subject and content of their work. The overlap and repetition of form and idea is intriguing, as these three would seem to come at their work from very different perspectives.
Isaac Layman, currently showing his second consecutive solo exhibit at the newly relocated, pocket-sized Lawrimore Project, is best known for larger-than-life, hyper-realistic, digital photographs of his home. Sensual, highly-detailed domestic subjects include a view inside a dirty oven, a set of blue-grey, sediment-filled ice cube trays, and a tiny digital photograph of a blacked-out window, rendered in such fine detail — an “ungodly dpi” according to Scott Lawrimore (Layman tells me it’s 480 dpi, the smallest he can get) — that it reads like film.
Oscar Tuazon is best known in Seattle for his collaborative work with his brother, Eli Hansen, exploring geodesic domes, blown glass versions of the Heineken beer bottle as building block, and photo documentation of abandoned homeless encampments. Hansen’s work was seen both at Howard House (now shuttered) and Seattle Art Museum. Tuazon’s recent solo work exhibits more of a minimalist bent, and he’s pushing his folded paper works to bigger and bigger dimensions.
Auerbach’s colorful pieces riff on text and numbers, employing font and design, and are often informed by the language of print advertising and computer-rendered graphics. Her works were seen at the Whitney Museum Construction Site this past summer, and she is represented by Deitch projects (New York) and Standard (Oslo), in Norway (Tuazon is also represented by this gallery). Auerbach’s previous work at Western Bridge, seen in March of last year, was a multi-layered figure. Yes or No and/or Yes and No is comprised of all the letters of its title, a sans-serif font in all caps, rendered one on top of the next. A mess of lines and color gone abstract, this etching’s meaning is obscured beneath the swoop and gesture of type. Or perhaps the title’s ambivalence is revealed in the play of color and overlapping line: yeses and noes made maybes by their very unreadability.
All three artists seem to be stretching when they arrived at their folded photographs. Tuazon might be seen as working out from the geodesic dome, in flattened form. Auerbach employed a more minimal use of color and layering in this series, using photography in a very different way than she has in the past. And Layman’s folded works, intimate small-scale experiments which date to his grad school days at the UW, seem to relate more to his very newest works than to the pieces he is best known for. There is a reliance on process as meaning in all these folded works, which seems to get at something essential for all three artists.
“I was doing a printing of photographs, sort of for the first time in a long time,” Tuazon explained during a recent phone call to his home in Paris. “It must have been 2007, maybe it was 2006. I was taking these pictures that were of places in the woods, weird meeting places or places where people would go and get drunk and shoot guns, stuff like that. There was something about the content of those photographs and the process of making them. I wanted to somehow interrupt the very easy reading that a photograph can give, the fact that you look at photographs and can imagine being there.” Some of Tuazon’s first folded photographs were images of geodesic domes, where the image itself was broken by folds that mimicked the angles of the dome.
“Usually on the back of the photo paper you have a brand, and that one didn’t,” Tuazon said referring to One by One, the piece that hung at SAM in late 2007, with its blank side facing out. “I got it printed at this really cheap Chinese one-hour photo shop, and I think they were using a generic paper. There is some kind of content there, but it’s impossible to view, so it takes on that imaginative space.” Affixed to the wall with transparent packing tape, and puffed out at the diagonal seams, One by One reads like a flattened bit of origami, or a quilt with a secret underneath. In this way, the photograph is broken further, by obscuring its own image as well as interrupting its own flat surface with the markings of touch.
Isaac Layman approaches his folded works from a similar, but different perspective. “With the folded stuff,” Layman explains, “I wanted to never have the represented object removed, so the folds were integral.” Layman is not so much working to break the image, as Tuazon does, but is interested in photography as a document of its own process. He wants his work to “be an event with a consequence that is as close as I could conflate that with the representation.”
Layman explains his process like this: “I take the piece of paper in the dark and do a thing to it, or just leave it completely flat. I exposed that to a raking light, so it comes out looking just flat grey. But when you look closer, that texture is now being accentuated by these tiny, little shadows. It is a rendered picture of the paper itself.” For him, the process of making these folded works is about creating an object with light and dark, not a figure, but an abstraction on paper. “I enjoyed printing in the dark room,” Layman continues, “but the represented content that happens somewhere else out in the world kept getting in the way of seeing the object in front of me.”
Auerbach’s folded paper works exist as a series, with added color, which helps elucidate the progression of one work to the next. Her poster-size sheets hang in the upstairs gallery at Western Bridge, covering all four walls. Displayed in the order they were created, the accumulation of folds fills each successive picture plane with shade as well as dimensional variation.
“I took a piece of paper and folded it, lit it from the side and took a photo,” Auerbach explains. “I printed that photo out in a monochromatic palette, and then folded the print in a different way than I had folded the first piece of paper. That created piece number one. Then I took a photo of piece number one and printed it in another monochromatic palette, and then folded that print differently yet again. This made piece number two. I did this eight times. As the series progresses, the grids of fold lines pile up, and make a complicated network of topologies that could not physically coexist. In each piece, there are real folds competing with "fake" printed ones.”
Although she uses the process of photography, for Auerbach, this series is sculptural. “For the last year or so I've been working on creating objects/paintings of ambiguous dimension,” Auerbach writes in her artist statement. “I suppose some of this is motivated by a far-fetched hope that if I can merge the states of 2D and 3D, or at lease create a smooth transition between them, i.e. remove the boundary, that I will somehow be able to remove the boundary between this 3 (+1)D reality and other spatial dimensions.” (Auerbach also creates what she calls folded paintings in acrylic on canvas. These paintings are nearly 2D, and possess a lovely rumpled-sheet quality. Rendered in fabric, the folds exhibit a sensual texture, and the tactile presence of a more sculptural object.)
While Auerbach considers her folded paper series as sculpture, both Tuazon and Layman are adamant about their work as photography. “I think it’s still a photograph, it’s definitely a photograph,” insists Tuazon. “What it comes down to is listening to the photograph as a material, as an object instead of as an image.” Layman echoes this thought, speaking of his own work: “Though they’re abstract they seem like really great photography, though there isn’t a camera. Particularly accurate photography.” Layman is talking technicalities here, referring to the photograph’s essential nature as an object that depicts light and dark, and also, tells a tale. The power to relay a narrative, broken or whole, is part of what gives photography its power. The photographic object itself, paper, behaves as a photograph by employing the tropes of that medium without necessarily possessing an image.
In a move that brings all three artists to a similar spot, Tuazon has progressed from displaying the blank sides of printed photographs to working with folded sheets of photographic paper that never possessed any printed content. Recently, Tuazon’s folded pieces were part of a group show in Paris where the theme of the exhibit was folding. “It’s in the air,” he says. Layman’s current work at Lawrimore Project (on view until October 2) takes the idea of photograph as object one step further. His work there includes a sheet of photographic paper that is itself the rubbing of a wall, as well as a box frame that contains only three sheets of glass. The meaning of a photograph is morphed here, to be the object looked at. A picture plane is employed, as well as the apparatus of looking: the meaning, really, is what has been folded. A photograph is a constructed view of something, with the viewer put into the place of the lens.
Adriana Grant is a freelance art writer. Her work has appeared in print in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Weekly, as well as in Arcade, art ltd., City Arts, Public Art Review, and Sunset magazines.
Image: Isaac Layman’s Folded Paper Photogram 3. Courtesy of the artist.
