Artist Statement: Shadow Tessalations
Christine Dalenta and Benjamin Parker recently completed a series that draws heavily upon their respective areas of expertise: photography in Dalenta's case, and paper folding in Parker's. Parker is at the forefront of a new, mathematically based origami method called tessellation. The term refers to geometric designs composed of identical shapes that fit together exactly. Dalenta and Parker's project was prompted by the acquisition of a vintage photographic paper designed to allow folding without cracking. Long out of production, it had originally been used for French-folded greeting cards, for prints to be attached to reports and theses, and for military mapmaking. Dalenta and Parker folded this light-sensitive paper in the darkroom, exposed it, and processed it through standard fiber print chemistry. The resulting Shadow Tessellations, as the artists call them, investigate and complicate the differentiation between image and object. They are photogram-like, but the paper itself has modulated the light, while simultaneously responding to exposure and forming a latent image. In addition, it is often difficult to tell if the three-dimensionality perceived in these object/images is truly of the paper, or on the paper and illusory. Although the contemporary photograph has long outgrown the limitations of John Szarkowski's mirror or window classification, the photograph as object has not. Photographic paper is, for the most part, still seen as extremely fragile and functionally transparent. To touch it is to risk disintegration at worst or a fingerprint at best. Either could render a print unusable, but the fingerprint might be especially unforgivable, as it introduces a secondary indexical representation, along with lasting evidence of the physicality of the paper and the identity of its maker. In the work of Dalenta and Parker, however, the material nature of the paper is celebrated and the paper itself becomes an inextricably bound equal to the image it holds.