Cool blues and vivid oranges, the colors of seas and sunsets, offered moments of sumptuous splendor in Eileen Quinlan’s “The Waves,” an elegantly austere show of eighteen primarily abstract photographs. The works, printed on aluminum-framed mirrors, seemed lit from within, allowing for subtle interactions between spectator and subject. Interested in photography’s power to seduce, with an emphasis on disrupting passive viewing—aspects the artist has explored, through a Brechtian lens, over the course of some twenty years—Quinlan here had folded these long-standing concerns into a pleasure-filled dreamscape. The concepts underlying the artist’s earlier projects seemed to have been metabolized into a set of images more heuristic than didactic, harnessing the medium’s capacity for luscious beauty.
The pieces on display here, with their uniform scale (roughly forty by thirty inches) and spacious installation, allowed for discrete viewing experiences, intimate, one-on-one interactions. Quinlan seemed to be exploring the ways in which images resolve and cohere, utilizing, via analog and digital processes, a variety of materials such as found internet footage, commercial videos, expired film, and pictures of her own nude body. Five works, including Spin Cycle Set (Wedding List), 2023, from one of the artist’s new series, feature dramatic stills of cresting and splashing water culled from a surf video that Quinlan rephotographed, solarized, and manipulated in Photoshop. (The artist calls her series “sets” because the word set, in scientific terms, refers to a succession of ocean waves.) In contrast to earlier investigations that incorporate more referential imagery—including a group of 2016 works that feature news photos documenting the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Paris and Palmyra, Syria, that occurred the previous year—these pieces are more nebulous, elusive. The reversal of dark and light, echoing the play between positive and negative inherent to analog photography, in combination with the mirrored surface produced stunning moments of hydrokinetic energy. Elsewhere, two cameraless images from the 2023 “Swipe Set,” made on discontinued Polaroid Type 55 large-format film, evidenced Quinlan’s ongoing experiments with chance and control (the medium is unpredictable because of its expired chemistry). The film, which Polaroid stopped making in 2008, failed to disengage from its packet during the exposure period and yielded purely chemical compositions full of silvery smears, streaks, and pools, calling to mind metallic Color Field paintings.
Quinlan’s images stand independently as strong formal declarations, but, pulled together, they reveal their relationships to one another to be primary. In a 2018 interview, the artist said she thought about her work “syntactically.” Quietly evocative as an installation, this show brought up questions regarding the fugitive nature of subjective experience. In past projects, Quinlan emphasized formal, technical, and conceptual rigor. Yet the art that resulted from this approach always felt hampered by her fastidious handling. By not making declarative statements about the state of the world in this presentation, she opened herself up to a way of creating and understanding images in which nothing is as cut and dried, or as solid, as it may have once seemed. And from this rich amorphousness, something quite powerful arose.
— Margaret Ewing