EILEEN QUINLAN


“Transformation plays a big role in my work,” says Eileen Quinlan, one of a small number of young artists whose work blurs conventional lines between photography and something wholly other. Like her peer Oliver Michaels, Quinlan uses photography to create editioned pieces that underscore and foreground the hard limits of the photographic medium while simultaneously transcending them in works suffused with delightful ambiguity and tension.

“I’ve always been interested in the way the camera optically transforms and translates the things it renders,” she says. “My compositions are lens-based, I’m taking into consideration how the camera sees and distorts reality.”

Quinlan’s compositions are thick with texture and often shaped by hard, kaleidoscopic geometries. She works almost exclusively in a studio environment and harbors an avid interest in transformation, both metaphorical and material. Though she sometimes shoots easily identifiable objects against a backdrop that comfortably recedes, Quinlan’s work more often creates deliberate vagueness between figure and ground. While her pieces often begin as objective documents of multiple layers of gossamer materials, they’re more likely to read at a glance as pure, visceral abstraction. Quinlan doesn’t mind the uncertainty. “The more confusion, the better,” she admits.

The artist’s technical process lends itself to that confusion. “I shoot with an outdated Polaroid product that produces a viable negative, but the film is very unstable,” she explains. “The surface is easily marred, and lends itself to all kinds of manipulation. The film is allowed to languish in water until it deteriorates. Sometimes I even add other liquids—like tequila—to the bath to see how the process of decay is accelerated or altered. At some point, I retrieve some sheets from the soup and stop their process of degradation by washing and drying them, essentially fixing them at the point of removal.” The alterations Quinlan makes to her photographs are both physical—scratching the film with tacks, steel wool, and ballpoint pens—and temporal, leaving the film in a bath saturated with powerful chemistry, sometimes for weeks.

Given the relative freedom of the photographic medium (along with the latter-day digital tools that make almost any outcome possible), Quinlan recognizes that imposing structure is perhaps the surest way to ensure that her work retains its integrity and its undeniably seductive draw on the viewer.

“Constraints have always been productive for me,” she says. “That’s one of the reasons I work in the studio: It’s a limit, and that’s also why I work in analog photography. There are so many ways to tweak in a digital environment. I have the sense that I wouldn’t know when to quit.”

Doggedness, relentlessness, obsession—those classically artistic traits cast a long shadow over Quinlan’s practice. “I think about exhaustion,” she says. “What happens when I’ve done something to death? Does it allow me to access a whole other level? How can I push past my initial, possibly clichéd reaction to a given subject? Boredom and failure can produce worthwhile results.”

Quinlan embraces restrictions. For “Curtains,” her recent solo exhibit at Miguel Abreu on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Quinlan presented a series of twenty-four unframed, modestly sized images. The uniformity of the images spread across the blank walls of the gallery was impossible to ignore and introduced a new level of meaning to the work.

“A lot of those decisions are arbitrary,” Quinlan admits. “I try to demonstrate that. How does an artist know what size to make any artwork? In ‘Curtains,’ I made smaller prints, because I wanted to fit a lot of them in the gallery, and also because I wanted them to be easily available to the eyes of a viewer. They don’t require scanning, you can take them in fully with a glance. They are about the same size as a human head. And they were naked—no frame, no glass, no distancing mechanism of any kind. Making them uniform was to de-emphasize a dialogue about format that I sometimes like to engage in. I wanted the focus to be less on the physical thing (except for the gorgeous curve of the paper) and more on the images themselves. More image this time, less object.”

“Less object” seems an apt way to describe Quinlan’s preoccupations. The works in “Curtains” were the antithesis of the mannered, packaged, and weighty art object that a well-heeled consumer might desire to possess. This kind of focus on de-commodification is by design. Quinlan is one of a bold and growing group of young artists who are actively working against the conventional attributes that make work easily collectible, instead using seriality as a theoretical tool, and pushing Benjaminian notions about reproducibility to their logical, 21st-century conclusions.

“I sense that people, especially collectors, privilege what they consider to be ‘unique,’ ” Quinlan notes. “I like playing with that. My work looks like a one-off, but it isn’t. How do people reckon with that? Does the realization that my photo is editioned deflate it somehow? I want people to think about how that aura of uniqueness affects their experience of the thing before them and what that might say about our human desire to fully possess things.

“Maybe it’s because I’m a multiple myself,” she laughs. “I have a twin sister.”

For more information, please visit EileenQuinlan.com. Quinlan’s work currently appears in the group show “What Is a Photograph?” running through May 4 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Sixth Avenue, New York. All images courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

Kevin Greenberg is the art editor of The Last Magazine. He is also a practicing architect and the principal of Space Exploration, an integrated architecture and interior design firm located in New York. In addition to his work for The Last Magazine, Kevin is an editor of PIN-UP, a semi-annual “magazine for architectural entertainment.”

Eileen Quinlan, 'Portrait of Space,' 2011.
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