Sister Chapman on Allison Olivia Evans
Three Oneiric Views, 2013, single-channel video projection
[Video description: Three circles of slightly different sizes are projected onto a black background. They are arranged in a row at subtly different heights, and appear as portals. The video footage that is displayed in each projection shifts, sometimes out of focus and sometimes clear. The videos seem to have been taken through various windows. At times one or more of the circles disappears and then reappears. There is a melancholic humming sound throughout the video.]
Photography is a devotional medium. A devotional act. Even with the proliferation of digital media, analog photographic processes, with their established rituals, have steadily maintained a cult status. Early practices like daguerreotypes, and even pre-photographic techniques such as cyanotypes, have resurfaced, privileging the organic nature of these forms. Diving further into the past, artists are making photographic recordings of camera obscuras, and even camera obscuras themselves are being developed as installations. These unfixable images radically restructure the viewer’s relationship to time and the camera apparatus.
In the work of artist Allison Olivia Evans, situation-specific installations—contemporary camera obscuras—re-situate our relationship to durational image gazing. Seeing is given preference over preservation as the aperture facilitates a personal cinema experience in which space, image, material, and form coalesce and collapse. These camera obscuras are devotions to the process of seeing light and shadow. An intimate kind of looking.
Untitled Interior No. 1, 2013, inkjet Print, 24 x 32 in.
[Image description: An abstract image with variegated shades of tan, black, and gray. A dark band runs through the image vertically, while another runs horizontally, which gives the effect of a set of four window panes.]
To understand the poetry and complexity of Evans’s work, we must acknowledge its trajectory, which is circular rather than linear. An ouroboros— that image of a snake swallowing its tail— a perfect symbol of vitality. Her practice began, as it does for many who work with light and the camera apparatus, in the darkroom. Analog photography. Influenced by artists such as Uta Barth, her work’s subject matter is concerned with light, shadow, the process of photography, and the viewer’s relationship to looking and seeing.
Preliminary Light Study, 2017, inkjet Print, 42 x 30 in.
[Image description: A largely black image, with wavering lines of warm light spreading from right to left in the lower two-thirds of the image. They have a faint horizontal pattern that suggests light passing through window blinds.]
Moving out of the darkroom, Evans’s practice broke with representation, shifting from a focus on visual perception to an investigation of the materiality of lightness and darkness within photographic processes. Still photographs became projected images and videos, which led to, as Evans phrases them, “situation-specific” installations in which a viewer is engaging with a controlled phenomenological entity in four dimensions. Analog photography was replaced with digital video projection in controlled spaces These works evolved into the ongoing thesis of her art practice: the very vitality of light itself. The agency of this phenomenon, the energy of light itself in its purest form, and the impact that it has on spaces and bodies. Digital technologies circled back to analog as Evans started to make real-time camera obscura installations with available light, as well as using a projector and unexposed 16 mm film to engage viewers with an entirely different cinematic experience.
Nocturne No. 1, 2017, installation documentation; black vinyl, darkened room, ambient light
[Video description: Lines of white fade in and out in a pitch-black space.]
The instructions for Evans’s Nocturne No. 1 (2017) read: “Two visitors at a time/Close the door during viewing/Allow five minutes for your eyes to adjust.” In this piece, Evans fundamentally queers the aperture to break from the pictorial expectations of the camera obscura. Rather than a pinhole or lens through which the image from natural light is channeled, she uses black vinyl to create a square aperture, which abstracts the images that pass through it. Sitting in darkness with limited light is to become aware of one’s body. Lying in bed at night, a small sliver of light creeping in through your closed blinds, the faint glow animating the otherwise flat blackness of night in your bedroom. This sensitizes you to your body to what it feels like to see and move through space. A reminder of the materiality of light and shadow. Of the vitality of light.
Film & Light Piece, (2019 - ongoing), installation documentation; light-tight room, 16mm projector, KODAK 200T Color Negative Film
[Image description: A grid of eight rectangles, arranged in two columns on a dark background. The rectangles on the left side of the image are a warm brown, while those on the right are a brighter cream color. Small dots and scratches are visible on each of them.]
For Film & Light Piece (2019), Evans employs a light-tight room, a 16mm projector, and KODAK 200T Color Negative Film, exposing the unprocessed film through the act of running it through the projector. The audience watches as the projected image slowly darkens as a result of the celluloid film being exposed to the projector light. The screen fades, simultaneously mimicking the ending of a conventional film and queering the expected viewing experience. The material and subject matter are one and the same, unfolding before the viewer’s eyes. The screening is not documented. Each iteration of this piece is a one-off and only the immediate viewers are exposed to the piece’s ephemerality. Evans draws a subtle parallel between the photosensitivity of the celluloid film and the viewer’s bodies. Light is an agent of change. Of impermanence. Each time the piece is screened, she uses a fresh reel of film, which also introduces a degree of variation to what a viewer will see on the projected screen. These tightly controlled variables limit the range of what is visible. She carefully directs our looking while still allowing the materials to interact organically. Looking and experiencing are collapsed in on each other.
(view) through a door, 2020, installation documentation; sunlight, closed door, mirror, vellum, optical lens
[Image description: A color image with an intense vignette on all sides. It is out of focus and depicts what appears to be an architectural structure, with three white and gray columns in the center. The image is soft and hazy, with muted colors.]
This brings us to Evans’s recent installation, (view) through a door (2020), in which the artist calibrates an aperture atop of the peephole through which a viewer peers through her studio door. Once again, Evans subverts both traditional and contemporary utilizations of the camera obscura as installation, placing the viewer outside of it. She asks that you look through the peephole — a viewfinder — to see the mutable scene, the space behind them shifting in real time. Reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s final artwork, Étant donnés (1946-1966), (view) through a door subverts the voyeuristic gaze by projecting the exterior scene into the interior of the studio, implicating the viewer in the act of looking. To say that it is not about form would be to undercut the very materiality of light and shadow, which is Evans’s investigation. It is not about pictorial representation, but rather an ode to the undulations of light and shadow that can only be truly appreciated at the moment, in situ.
One definition of vitality is “the power giving continuance of life, present in all living things.” Throughout photographic history, light has been the vehicle through which representation has been made possible. Photography means, quite literally, “writing with light” (photo: light, and graph: to write). Light may very well be what illuminates things so that photographs can be made/taken, but that light, as Evans suggests, permeates everything. It is material, form, and subject. By removing notions of pictorial representation through her installations, she asks us to look at and consider our experiences of the material qualities of the very thing that gives us life.
Sister Chapman is a Southern California-based artist who works in filmmaking and writing.
[Image and video descriptions by Sister Chapman and Elizabeth Rooklidge.]