Eponanonymous

Liz Deschenes’ austere new exhibition blends photographic convention and experiment, sculptural form, and architecture.   The exhibition title, “Tilt / Swing,” takes its name from the movements of the camera lenses used in architectural photography.  Deschenes turns the language back on itself with a large six-panel work, itself titled Tilt/Swing, creating a piece that imposes optical distortions onto the space rather than discreetly eliminating them.

Liz Deschenes. Tilt / Swing (360° field of vision, version 1), 2009. 6 unique silver toned black and white photograms - various dimensions. Overall dimensions: H: 136 L: 192 W: 58 inches

Tilt/swing lenses work by allowing a photographer to place the lens on a plane that is not parallel to the plane of the film.  The most common purpose is for making the straight lines of architecture perfectly parallel and orthogonal in the image, rather than allowing them to converge perspectivally.  This technique allows the photographer to create an image which, in Picasso’s formulation, is “a lie which tells the truth.”  But the irony is not that this “perspective-corrected” lie is displacing a truth:  in fact, it just displaces a different lie.

Deschenes’ piece exploits this ballet of half-truths through the delicate equilibrium of a reduced number of artistic elements.  The six panels of Tilt/Swing are arranged like facets on a large cylinder encircling the rear gallery.  The prints are mounted on thin dibond panels, which are placed variously on the floor, flat on the wall, leaning into the wall, leaning away from the wall, and hanging from the ceiling.  The prints themselves are photograms made by exposing the paper directly to the night sky and then silver-toning them.  In effect, they depict nothing, their reflective surfaces streaked by chemicals, small sepia blips, and the onset of oxidation.

The consequences echo back through the language and concepts that define their forms.  Silver-toning a picture of empty sky creates a surface that reflects more than it depicts; the print (in general, the result of light passing through a lens) becomes the lens “through” which the viewer sees.  The flatness achieved by tilting in conventional architectural photography is asserted by the planar severity of each panel, but their arrangement into a cylinder whose cross-section is orthogonal to the plane of conventional gallery viewing (one could say the panels are arranged on the y-axis, rather than the customary x-axis) reinstates the spatial geometry of “architecture in general.”  Flattened space is re-inflated, and again un-picturable.

Which brings me to the other primary function of the tilt/swing lens, the precise control over depth of field.  The great emotive distortion of wide-aperture photography, throwing all but a sliver of the pictured field into a blurry bokeh, can itself be tilted onto any plane of the photographer’s choosing.  Just as the architectural inversions of the panels produce a paradox of “architecture in general,” so too do the multiply reflecting, fuzzy panels exploit “depth of field in general.”   That is, the whole art of using shallow focus is that the photographer makes a point about what’s in focus and what’s out of focus.  The photographic moment is decisive, and what’s lost is lost.

But in Tilt/Swing, the form of the object is the only thing “in focus.”  Staring into the blurry emptiness of the panels begins a visual journey down the rabbit hole.  First, a viewer looks for clues to what the panels are depicting; the little sepia blips might be a hidden image, as if they were a solarized daguerreotype.  Finding no purchase, one’s eyes shift the tiniest possible distance closer, to inspect the chemical stains and oxidation.  Though interesting as phenomena, one can’t linger there, especially since the next shift in focus is to one’s own blurry reflection on the surface.  Suddenly the silver panels plunge into space, and the fact of searching for content within the image seems myopic.  As one looks more deeply into the reflection, beyond his own image, he finds the gallery space and the other panels.  Then, most radically, looking into their askew reflections, fragments of the space jostle at seemingly incalculable angles.  The abandonment of an aestheticized focal field for a constantly permeating and collapsing one supercedes even the architectural displacements as the experiential center of the work.

For some time now, Liz Deschenes has been getting a lot of action out of seemingly simple investigations into photographic seeing.  By engaging real space, and so elegantly combining process-intensive ideas with visual ones, this show proves that her position in the top tier of “conceptual” photographers is a deserved one.