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 libera- tion as I learn to embrace transience within fine art.

In my ongoing body of work The Sunbathers, I create unfix- able 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, leav- ing viewers with only the memory of what they had seen.

Rebecca Renton

How did you land on photography as your primary medium?

I trained very seriously in classical ballet from ages 4 to 16, and photographers would always come to our school to take promotional or documentary photos––it was so fascinating to me. When I left the school, I stumbled into photography as my new creative outlet. I think I was drawn to the medium’s technical nature, it seemed there was this sense of structure: right and wrong–much like ballet. However, I really came to love photography once I became comfortable with experimenting and breaking that convention. It’s still a relatively young medium, and I think there’s a lot to explore within it.

If you could make collaborative work with anyone, who would you work with?

I’m a pop culture junkie, so probably someone like Paris Hilton or all the contestants on The Bachelor. I would also say Danny Trejo, but that’s just because I want to hang out with him. Maybe we could all do something together!

What do you do when you’re creatively stuck?

We’re living in a very odd fever dream, and I try to take time to closely observe and think critically about American/Western culture. Truth really is stranger than fiction, and work isn’t created in a vacuum.