WITNESS, DETECTIVE & IMPOSTER

Jenny Nordquist is a Copenhagen based artist, working with original glass magic lantern slides - Hyalotypes - in her own darkroom experiments to explore layers of time and entropy, and how our understanding of technology constructs our expectations of perception beyond what the naked eye can see.

Tracing patterns made by the eroded silver emulsion on old damaged Hyalotype glass plates, Nordquist enlarges and captures the plate’s contemporary condition of dissolving into gradual chemical decay. The circular lens-like framing of these prints suggests connections between micro and macro, near and far. The act of looking through the lens of a microscope is similar to that of a telescope, each moves the viewer’s enhanced field of perception in extreme opposite directions. In this way Nordquist draws connections between the lunar quality of the moon and patterns of gems and atoms, neither of which are visible to the naked eye.

Inspired by nineteenth century photomicrography and astronomical photography, Nordquist reflects on James Nasmyth’s 1870’s richly textured photographs of plaster lunar sculptural models, and Richard Adams Locke’s 1835 Great Moon Hoax about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. In Witness, detective and imposter, Nordquist conjures these historical events through her textured abstract imagery and further develops her own interplaying layers between imagination, perception and reinterpretation. The tactile patterns in Nordquist’s processes and photographs convey the ancient Greek Neo-Platonic schema of seeing the same configurations reproduced in all levels of the cosmos, from the large-scale macrocosm down to the small-scale microcosm.

“These works explore photography’s ability to serve as an index of the moment of its exposure, and a record of how the representational capacity of a photograph can change over time. I have used damaged images from my found archive originally depicting scenery of alpine landscape and enlarged and printed only the areas where the emulsion has eroded. This process of altering and reconceptualising my found Hyalotypes provokes new perspectives about the history of photography, it’s fragility and relation to nature. The emulsion on the old glass plates is dissolving, like a stream of soot slowly eroding a glacial landscape, exposing layers of time. The initial surface of emulsion was exposed onto the glass plate some 100 years ago, and since then layers of dust have collected on top, and now another layer has been added with my process of printing these images in the darkroom onto found foggy vintage Japanese Fiber-based paper, that had been accidently exposed to light “.

Witness, detective and imposter features a salon installation of prints made in the darkroom from Hyalotypes. Along with a rewired original lantern projector magnifying elements of Nordquist’s decaying glass plates combined with paint and a soundscape appropriated from a recording of the Moon Hoax. This creates an environmental installation that transports the viewer from reality to a dreamlike place of visual abstraction suspended in time.

By Kath Fries