In “Sight Lines,” Jessica Mallios’s contribution to the Spring 2014 International Artists in Residence exhibition at Artpace San Antonio (through May 18), the artist continues to delve into the relationship between the image and the object. She dislocates the viewer, creating photographs that act as objects and vice versa. While her work consistently scrutinizes how we come to develop meaning through images, her new, somewhat abstract series subtly includes elements of performance, documentation, and sculpture that foreground her interest in the phenomenology of photography.
Four of the photographs on view were made by exposing the same piece of black-and-white photographic paper to different levels of light in Marfa, Texas. The artist, reusing the same paper, folded it into sections that indexed various atmospheric conditions in West Texas. With a large-format camera, she documented the changing paper over time. Each image differs in color, dotting the landscape of the gallery with traces of green, red, and taupe. The creases in the pictures form a topography, while the collected markings evidence the land’s history. While one can tell that the creases are the same in each work, they all present a different view of the object — revealing the various stages of the paper’s life.
At the back of the gallery Mallios places two mirrored glass works: One lays flat on the floor and the other precisely divides the comer. Acting as mirrors (or as the artist deems them, “live photographs”), they reflect ever-shifting light in the space and the position of the viewer. Related to Mallios’s earlier holograms, these works point to how a photographic object can be unfixed, and also create shapes on the walls that resemble works by light artists James Turrell and Doug Wheeler. Her video, filmed for multiple days through the glass windows of San Antonio’s iconic Tower of the Americas, pays homage to the history of the Steadicam and the panoramic. Built for the 1968 World’s Fair, the rotating observation tower also houses a restaurant. The 61-minute video presents one full rotation of the tower with occasional black spaces obstructing the view as the building’s exoskeleton passes by the steady camera. Mallios’s interest in the tower is as both an object and a viewing platform, acting as another apparatus of unfixed photography.
Reserved yet strong, Mallios’s multiple imaging techniques speak precisely to how temporal and material elements can force viewers to reconsider the “truth” of pictures. The artist engages with both the history of the city and the history of photography, documenting and highlighting the ephemeral qualities of her medium.
A version of this article appears in the Summer 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
