Eileen Quinlan sets up a restricted frame for the production of the
fractured images that make-up Smoke & Mirrors. Using medium to large
format negatives with no digital intervention allows for slight details – the rough edge of a glass plane, some settling dust – to suggest a provisional clarity in the tell of an antiquated trick. The light of an amateur illusionist indexes the returning materiality of these images. As Quinlan seems to point to through a recurrent, outmoded fashion vernacular, these images cannot help but reflect upon the vulnerability of an increasingly totalized image world.
fractured images that make-up Smoke & Mirrors. Using medium to large
format negatives with no digital intervention allows for slight details – the rough edge of a glass plane, some settling dust – to suggest a provisional clarity in the tell of an antiquated trick. The light of an amateur illusionist indexes the returning materiality of these images. As Quinlan seems to point to through a recurrent, outmoded fashion vernacular, these images cannot help but reflect upon the vulnerability of an increasingly totalized image world.
Similarly, Quinlan’s work involves an ambivalent engagement with concrete photography’s aspirations toward an abstraction tantamount to the modernist avant-garde in more traditional media. The absorption of apparently non-representational photographic procedures into advanced image culture seems to complicate, if not annul, the validity of Quinlan’s recourse to the tropes of dynamic composition. Specifically addressing the latter, advertising is suggested in the scale and lighting of these images, but one consigned to obsolescence
through more advanced forms of digital imaging. One imagines that these are more the neglected products of stock photography, withdrawn from distribution, blown-up and framed without the stamp of investor
confidence.
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