M+B is pleased to present a curated online selection of works by Jessica Eaton, spanning three distinct bodies of work: the cfaal (Cubes for Albers and LeWitt) series, Pictures for Women, and the Mariphasa lupina lumina flower works. The presentation brings together a focused group of works that trace the breadth of Eaton’s photographic practice and her ongoing investigation into the potential of the fundamental mechanics of the medium.
Eaton builds her photographs through painstaking processes of multiple exposure, additive color separation, and precise control of reflectance, motion, light, and time. Through these technically exacting methods, she produces images that the naked eye could never perceive: geometric forms that appear to pulse with internal light, kinetic orbs that hover between abstraction and physical presence, and floral arrangements that oscillate between the lush and the spectral.
The cfaal works use monochromatic cube sets and layered exposures of RGB primaries to generate dense, luminous color fields, mixing color photographically as light waves like a painter mixes pigment. Pictures for Women extends these techniques onto kinetic sets, creating radiant looping forms that pay homage to landmark works by female artists including Carmen Herrera, Helen Frankenthaler, Hilma af Klint, and Sonia Delaunay. The Mariphasa lupina lumina flower works bring the same command of the photographic process to the tradition of the floral still life, using custom solarization techniques and historic bas-relief methods to press and invert pictorial information, producing images that hover between negative and positive, the ancient and the otherworldly.
Eaton’s photographs take photography itself as their central subject, using the components of the photographic process—lenses, shutters, film stock, filters, emulsions, color, and light—as tools for modelling and challenging human perception. In dialogue with the histories of modernist abstraction and scientific photography, as well as the contemporary prevalence of digital images and effects, Eaton’s work explores the limits of vision and its speculative frontiers.
