Two works translating family photographs into physical materials, shown together at The Lab in San Francisco.
Kodak, 1974 (1998, sugar and coffee, approx. 95″ × 57″) A photograph of a girl taken in 1974 is rendered as a bitmapped digital image, then reconstructed from sugar cubes — some dipped in coffee. Memory is evoked simultaneously as image and sensory experience.
Untitled (Smile) (1998, wood, approx. 6.5′ × 2.5′ × 6′) A stack of 2×2s with ends selectively painted to mimic ready-to-build lumber constructs the image of a smile cropped from a 1972 photograph — pixels with mass, length, and depth.
Both works were featured in Geoffrey Batchen’s essay “Post-Photography” in Each Wild Idea:
“Memory is painstakingly evoked as image (digital, and therefore simultaneously material and immaterial) and sensory experience (a smell so pungent one can taste it).” — on Kodak, 1974
“These are pixels that have mass as well as length and depth… her photogenic ‘wooden smile’ masquerades as a form of neominimal sculpture, recalling the stacking sculpture of Carl Andre and others.” — on Untitled (Smile)
Kenneth Baker also noted the work in the San Francisco Examiner.
