Jessica Eaton’s photographs take the medium of photography itself as their central subject, investigating the components of the photographic process—light, color, time, and the capacities of lenses, shutters, film stock, filters, emulsions, etc.—as tools for modelling and challenging human perception. Using inventive and technically exacting analog methods, Eaton produces alternate visions of reality, capturing images that the naked eye could never perceive. In dialog with the history of modernist abstraction and scientific photography as well as the contemporary prevalence of digital images and effects (which Eaton mimics through in-camera techniques), her work explores the limits of vision as well as its speculative frontiers.
Jessica Eaton (b. 1977, Regina, Saskatchewan) received her BFA from the Emily Carr University in Vancouver. In 2019 she was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include Mariphasa lupine lumina, Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal, Canada; Time On A Bottle at Higher Pictures Generation; Wild Permutations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland; Flash: Jessica Eaton at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside; and Ad Infinitum, The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Eaton was selected for the 2017 iteration of the Canadian Biennial, and her work was exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada. Eaton has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Under Construction – New Positions in American Photography, Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Process and Abstraction at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station; Color Acting: Abstraction Since 1950 at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; Québec Triennial at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; Photography is Magic, Daegu Photography Biennale; and Phantasmagoria at Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver. Eaton was nominated for the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2016. Notable press includes The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, ARTnews (cover) and The Guardian. Her work can be found in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, among others. Jessica Eaton lives and works in Toronto, Canada.