Coming Down to Earth: Anne Arden McDonald
Coming Down to Earth:
ANNE ARDEN MCDONALD
The exhibition Coming Down to Earth features a selection of works from Anne Arden McDonald’s cameraless alternative process series, Atom, Planet:
While most photography employs a lens, and either film or a digital sensor, this series explores ways of generating images on photographic paper without using a camera or negative. The source of inspiration for inventing processes that inform the resulting photograph is the dialogue that occurs between painters or sculptors, and their chosen medium. Another is the scientific method, where you observe phenomena, formulate a hypothesis, test it with experiments, use careful measurements, note variables, observe results, and use this information to build an image.
While still working with photo paper, light, and chemistry, I revisit some historic processes like Man Ray’s photogram, Pierre Cordier’s chemigram, and lumen printing, and also invent other ways of producing images without using a negative. These processes are utilizing optical situations, or chemical reactions, or a combination of the two. Applying glue as a resist and digging down to the photo paper surface with alternating photo chemicals causes an image to emerge on the paper in the form of a chemical painting. Some of these camera-less experiments include painting bleach onto blackened photo paper, building layered piles of glass and eggshells and moving around them with a flashlight to make an exposure, and growing a self-replicating garden of mold that feeds on silver gelatin paper. In one image, over 100 medicines, spices, and household cleaners were applied to photo paper and run through darkroom chemistry to test for colors and textures. The methods are an unorthodox collection of materials and techniques from the domestic and scientific realms, brought into the darkroom, often coaxing or scrubbing an image into the photographic paper. Some images are made in the dark and some in daylight, some processes are additive and others reductive, the result is a series of photographs.
The imagery emerges as circles and spheres, representing planets and atoms, visualizing the macrocosm and the microcosm of life as we know it. My obsession with these forms has lasted 15 years, they are so much of what I see and experience. When I stand in landscape, the horizon is a circle; when nature goes through four seasons and Spring comes again, that is a circle. Day begins again, circles are a constant experience, either spatially or temporally. For many years, I made self portraits with a camera, making narrative images. With this abstract work, I am exploring the deeper story, the older story, the story of all of us, the story of atoms and planets, both circles—it is also an expression of my search for a sense of wholeness.
Photography is a very young and exciting medium, and there is so much undiscovered terrain. In some ways, it stands at a precipice: digital photography is eroding the availability of some analog materials, and the study and use of silver gelatin papers. Photographers have primarily used photo paper in the service of negatives, but it has other interesting applications as an art material. I am working to develop these processes, and to pose interesting questions about what photography is, and what it can be.
Anne Arden McDonald is a Brooklyn based visual artist who grew up in Atlanta Georgia. From age 15 to 30 she made self portraits by building installations in abandoned interiors and performing privately for her camera in these spaces, publishing a book of this work in 2004. For 20 years, she was a private dealer for 13 Czech and Slovak photographers who do performances for the camera. She also has a large body of dreamy photographs shot with a Diana camera over several decades. More recently she has been using light and chemistry the way a painter or sculptor would to build images on photographic paper.
Coming Down to Earth will be on view at Candela Gallery through April 23, 2022.