Nancy Davenport at EXILE

Artist: Nancy Davenport

Exhibition title: Polaroids

Venue: EXILE, Berlin, Germany

Date: July 7 – 30, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and EXILE, Berlin

Nancy Davenport’s exhibition entitled Polaroids presents two new artworks sourced from her archive of Polaroid photographs. Presented in separate rooms around their source archive athese two works are entitled Eclipse (Technicolor) and STEREO.

Centrally positioned in-between the two new works is Davenport’s source archive entitled And then.. which contains her remaining stock of approx 300 unique polaroids, arranged in random piles on a work table. The archive includes thematic and formal elements from the two other pieces, as well as personal snapshots of Vancouver’s punk music scene, taken when Davenport was a teenager. All the images were shot off-screen with the last of the artists’ supply of Polaroid self-developing film.

For the ten-part series Eclipse (Technicolor), the artist shot the final seconds of a 1936 Warner Bros cartoon, frame by frame. As the trademark WB concentric circles fade out, the effect that emerges is strangely lush, evoking astrological photographs of a total solar eclipse. The intimate scale of this series is contrasted by STEREO, a single polaroid blown-up to fit the gallery wall. The pattern makes reference to stereoscopic images which were used to demonstrate the phenomenon of ‘binocular rivalry’. A vertiginous, visually confusing effect (the phenomenon of ‘rivalry’), can be experienced after a few minutes of staring unblinking, from the center of the room at the wallpaper.

The limiting dichotomies of material versus data, past versus present do not account for the erratic temporality of these images. These Polaroids are on the edge of what remains of analogue fixity; they are both fluid and fixed, unique while at the same time unprecious and transitional – acknowledging the exhilaration of notation and process, the continual circulation back and forth from material to data to material to data….

Since the early 2000’s, Davenport’s work has consistently explored temporal ambiguity and the territory between photography and film. Her work has been exhibited at a variety of venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art NY, the Liverpool Biennial, the Istanbul Biennial, the São Paulo Biennial, and the the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, October Magazine, Frieze, New York Times, Art in America and Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon Press).