Kodak, 1974

1998, Sugar, coffee, approx. 95” x 57”

A photograph of a girl taken in 1974 is translated into a bitmapped digital image and constructed out of sugar cubes, some dipped in coffee.

Untitled (Smile)

1998, Wood, approx. 6.5’ x 2.5’ x 6’

A stack of 2x2s with ends selectively painted to mimic a stack of ready-to-build-with lumber makes up the image of a smile cropped from a photograph taken in 1972.

These pieces, here shown at The Lab in San Francisco, were featured in Geoffrey Batchen’s essay “Post-Photography,” from the book Each Wild Idea. Art critic Kenneth Baker mentioned them in the San Francisco Examiner.

On Kodak, 1974:

“Memory, (of her girlhood but also of her father’s caffeine consumption) is painstakingly evoked as image (digital, and therefore simultaneously material and immaterial) and sensory experience (a smell so pungeant one can taste it)”.
—Geoffrey Batchen, “Post-Photography,” Each Wild Idea

On Untitled (Smile):

“…a neat pile of lumber that brings late 60’s stacking sculpture to mind…”
—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Examiner

“…These are pixels that have mass as well as length and depth (a state of being antithetical to their electronic existence as pure surface). At the same time her photogenic ‘wooden smile’ masquerades as a form of neominimal sculpture, recalling the 1960’s stacking sculpture of Carl Andre and others.
—Geoffrey Batchen, “Post-Photography,” Each Wild Idea