In my ongoing body of work The Sunbathers, I create unfixable images with waxed negatives, turmeric, and week long exposures to direct sunlight. The series features indistinct figures sunbathing on lawns, eventually transforming into bold yellow color fields as they are re-exposed to UV light. The sunbathers appear blissfully unaware of their demise or simply apathetic. Although originally begun in 2018 in response to my fear of death and environmental collapse, the series became an oddly fitting visual for the COVID-19 crisis. In our time of social distancing during a global pandemic, these isolated figures appear to be enjoying moments of leisure– even as the world burns around them. Creating impermanent objects through photographic methods undermines the common purposes of photography– to freeze, to preserve, to hoard. This manic obsession with ownership increasingly felt deeply unhealthy to me. I began to seek out a way to make photography experiential, tactile, and poetic. The anthotype process, being unstable and impermanent, appealed to my desire to create this new hybridized type of photographic work. As the image is constantly deteriorating, viewers may have several different experiences with the work: pristine and crisp, faded, or blank. The faded block of color then becomes an artifact of what image was once there, leaving viewers with only the memory of what they had seen.
@ rebecca.renton
Rebecca Renton
Oscillating between deep sincerity and irony, my work aims to process ephemerality, chaos, leisure, and doom. Influenced by the lightning speed at which contemporary culture moves, I utilize labor intensive and time consuming processes which result in a fleeting, rapidly decaying art-object. My processes have become compulsive, experimental, and a mode of liberation as I learn to embrace transience within fine art.
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