Crumpled translucent paper, lit from behind and photographed close. Three operations follow and nothing else: the color is pushed past plausibility — violet, sodium yellow, an arterial red; some frames are mirrored into symmetry; others are cut into horizontal bands and re-set slightly out of register, the seams left visible.
The mirror is the argument. Fold a scrap of paper down its center line and the eye stops seeing paper: it finds a face, a ribcage, a mask, a figure standing in a lit doorway — and it finds them before any decision is made. Left unmirrored, the same frames stay weather: cloud, smoke, a green sea under ice.
Utopia is usually argued about as a place, and whether one could be built. What the material says is narrower and harder to dismiss: the faculty that builds it is cheap and always running. A few centimeters of discarded paper will start it.
Made and exhibited at the University of Rochester in 2015.
Two pieces from this collection are available as prints through Fine Art America.
