Folding an Empire
For a long time now, I have enjoyed the process of tearing images out of print media and making folds to change the composition. I also do this to my own photographs (I am too careful with my own). Landscapes rotated by a fold reimagine the horizon line broken into angular parts. Folded portraits release the body from its corporeal limitations; hands reach far, eyes gaze inwards, torsos twist double, and legs dance even more. The spatial reality of a folded image extends a touch outwards to us, the viewers. We expect images to be somewhat rectangular (squares are rectangles). We expect them to delineate their space from our space. In making these folds, our respective spaces collide.
Folding is erotic, emotional, and political. People from the other side of the page end up in embrace. Redacted facial clues augment emotional uncertainty. Image borders become less embedded with visual power. These observations are based on prioritizing a spatial dimension, one that we may understand better than a temporal dimension. Artist Alison Rossiter provides one possible understanding of time through abstract images created without a camera inside the darkroom. The absence of the camera challenges us to think about the nature of these images beyond one to one representation. To complicate these works further, Rossiter uses expired photographic paper as the image surface. For the most part, these expired photographic surfaces had the intent of representing clear, camera-based images. They never received that opportunity. Instead, the paper sat inside a mostly light tight packaging for years, decades, or even a whole century. Leah Ollman writes about Rossiter’s work, “the ultimate fusion is staged on each exposed sheet, the ultimate masquerade: space assumes a temporal dimension, and time a spatial presence” (Ollman, “Between what is and what else” in Expired Paper, 2017). Through this “fusion,” time folds to reveal its own visual representation. Rossiter reveals the visual consequences of time passing through the metaphor of the chemical photographic process.
Two pieces of expired paper no longer cradle each other inside their long-time storage container. Instead, Rossiter places one next to the other after the pouring(?) of developer on a part of the paper. Finishing the chemical process, Rossiter fixes the images chemically and then physically inside a frame. The slight dark edges of each print indicate that during a century of storage, the edges of the paper had been exposed to light, perhaps in a single moment or cumulative over time. Like Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) from 1991, Rossiter’s Darko, expired October 1915, processed 2017 (#2) uses a diptych structure that collides into our own space. The space between expired paper or between two synchronized (sometimes not synchronized), ticking (sometimes not ticking) clocks implicates us inside the composition. The work of art folds us into its space and its time.
I used to own this shirt with the printed image of a Greco-Roman bust in profile. The bust image was surrounded by a printed frame of a repeating, abstract, golden design. During the routine of laundry, I folded the shirt cropping the image to just the eyes, forehead, hair and a hint of that golden pattern. The photograph of the moment isolates and emphasizes the shirt against the light fabric background. The irregular and slightly curved shadow below shirt further separates it from the background while appearing like the shadow of the edge of ripped paper. Images of these busts circulate in western art history classes, in unassuming posters that in reality advertise white supremacy groups, in auction house catalogs, and as visual material for artists across time. In certain ways, these busts allude to a timelessness that adapts to its use, whether artistic, commercial, or ideological. I remember taking scissors to this shirt because I no longer wanted to wear it. Without fabric scissors, the process was more laborious than expected. Edges curled and blades blunted. In the end, these scraps never materialized into anything.
My fascination with folding images, collage, and photographs exists partially as a defense mechanism of the power of images. Images move like empires intentionally and unintentionally changing the space around them. When we confront images, we ought to consider their collision into our space. This can be uncomfortable, it can challenge our perspectives, it can helps us rid ourselves of unnecessary baggage, it can even helps us become experts at folding empires.
Works Cited
Leah Ollman, “Between what is and what else” in Alison Rossiter: Expired Paper (Santa Fe, NM: Radius Books, 2017)