08/11/2016
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Bridget Conn, Fissure I, photography on mixed media panel, 12" x 12"x 2.5", 2016. Bridget is one of our artist in the A Constellation collective.
Bridget Conn
Artist Statement
Gone are the days when photographs were collected in shoeboxes. The common purpose of a photograph – a document of the physical world – no longer takes the form of an object, but rather a collection of pixels on a screen. In this reality, I see the photograph as a physical material, rather than viewing it as an overlooked medium for a scene captured from reality. As such, in our current era, the darkroom has transformed from a technological venue that produces commercial items into a realm of artistic exploration and discovery. The collaged elements here are chemigrams, which are made with no negatives, no enlargers, pulling color out of black and white gelatin silver paper by applying resists, and then alternating the paper between developer and fixer, and back again. Freed from representation, I explore the properties and potential of traditional photographic paper in and of itself – each brand’s range of color, how the paper reacts to a wide variety of resists, and how different brands of darkroom chemicals will create different visual results. In my process lies a constant struggle between control and chance. Mark-making is important to me as an artist – a strong gesture that represents the physicality and intent of the individual. My early years as a darkroom student were filled with frustration that my hand was not as evident in the finished prints as I wanted them to be. The marks I make in my chemigrams are spontaneous and subliminal, drawing through resists and displaying a secret language that isn’t even known to myself. By slicing my compositions into strips and creating collages, my awareness of how I repeat certain gestures is intensified, as I break them apart with negative space and still detect the energy of similar marks replicated over and over. In revealing the wood substrate, I aim to equate the viewer’s understanding of wood as a sculptural material with the physicality of photographic paper. I also interpret these negative spaces as current gaps in our culture’s understanding of the darkroom’s evolution, how in time, it will fall in line with printmaking, painting, and all other art media which were once considered a pinnacle of technology.
