Photograph Magazine
Unseen Magazine, Amsterdam
Lenscratch
Photofairs Shanghai: Cyanotype
Joanne Dugan on Instagram Live with Black Box Projects
New York Times T Magazine
Los Angeles Center of Photography
Press/Profile Excerpts:
“Working extensively with analogue silver gelatin silver prints, Joanne Dugan creates unique works by hand using traditional photographic tools and processes, often without the use of a camera. Multiples are printed out, cut and assembled by hand - the physical print is both the subject and the object in the work.
The artist utilizes a slow and methodical approach to rendering a work, a purposeful response to the fast-paced world of digital photography and technological advancement. Dugan brings a meditative practice to the making of her works, where the creation and assembly of the finished pieces involves repetitive movements and intricate hand-cutting techniques. The assembled grids of the Multiples series, where one frame in each composition stands out as different from the others, is meant to symbolise the flash of insight that occurs through meditation. In Buddhist practice this awakening is called Satori, or enlightenment. Within the Meditations series, Dugan extends this practice of hand cutting and creating re-assembled works with a great intricacy and allows a more informal arrangement of the assembled prints. The resulting compositions directly reference and reinterpret the rudimentary analogue darkroom objects that aided in the very creation of the works.
In Enlarger Lens Meditation, 2019, fifty single silver gelatin prints are created by using the light of an enlarger lens at differing apertures to create monochromatic circles, the resulting arrangement is a minimal abstraction reminiscent of optical art. The stark, monochromatic black and white contrasts and repetitions create the impression of movement within these quiet, slow-process meditative works.”
Martin Barnes
Senior Curator, Photographs
Victoria and Albert Museum
for Black Box Projects “Fundamentals” exhibition catalog
London, England
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“Joanne Dugan has practiced some form of meditation for about a decade – she calls it “a repetitive practice of quiet sitting,” to de-emphasize the formality of certain meditation practices and highlight its accessibility. About five years ago, she began to move away from representational imagery in her photographic practice to more abstract, process-based work, and she had an epiphany. “I realized my darkroom was a meditative space,” she says.
She began creating grids, in the vein of Bernd and Hilla Becher, though she was perhaps influenced on a deeper level by the contemplative nature of Agnes Martin’s abstract, minimalist paintings. Dugan lives in Harlem and her studio looks down over Union Square, so her life outside the darkroom is oriented by grids as well. Working in gelatin silver or cyanotype, she makes cameraless images in the darkroom, prints them out, then carefully cuts and assembles one-of-a-kind works with those small, hand-cut prints. The individual images themselves are made, as she puts it, in collaboration with her darkroom, using the tools of the darkroom itself – setting the light of the enlarger lens to different apertures, for example, or allowing light leaks into the darkroom. Each individual image in the resulting assemblage is slightly different, though close, prolonged looking is often required to see those differences. In some of the works, though – Epicenter Meditation #1, New York City, 2020, comprised of 25 2×2 ½-inch cyanotypes, or Epicenter Meditation #3 (Talisman), New York City, 2020, comprised of 40 2 ½ x 3 ½-inch silver-gelatin photographs – there is one image that is clearly unlike the others. This singular image represents the flash of insight that sometimes happens during an ongoing repetitive practice like meditation – or, as Agnes Martin once described it, “that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind.”
Because Dugan attaches the individual, hand-cut photographs onto a rectangular support, the final pieces have an object quality – to a greater or lesser degree, the viewer is aware of the edges of each component of the piece, of its quality as an assemblage of photographs rather than a single photograph. As much as they are about repetition and looking, Dugan’s works also allow for, and even welcome, imperfection. The slight differences, or imperfections, in each individual image are where they grip and hold our attention, catching the eye as it glides over the surface of the work, a gentle call to attend to what’s in front of you. “I hope,” she says of her work, “that there’s some kind of shift in the act of looking.”
…her contemplative work is, in many ways, ideal viewing for this moment.”
Jean Dykstra
Editor
Photograph Magazine
New York, NY
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”Miss Joanne Dugan comes waltzing into this arena like a jazz drummer riffing like a mad woman. She delivers the messages here in the form of rhythmic series and very spare, uncanny arrangements of black things — specks and lines and curves. This is very cool stuff.
She seems to be listening to some unseen but heard, offstage combo. She lets the light — and shadows — pass through her like a Delphic oracle. Given the length of her career it is amazing to find an artist still so in touch with her unconscious with these seemingly formal considerations of light on paper.
Dugan says she aspires “to create abstract pieces that invite viewers to experience what it feels like to stand in front of something consciously and to see it in a new way.” I like her in and out-of-body sensitivity and her reference to James Turrell: “I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.” (my italics)
Oddly this work has the formality and alien quality of the early IBM computer “punch” cards with its load of undecipherable data — hieroglyphics for the Modern era.
Abstract work has the potential to suggest. Great photographs — art — for me are best when enigmatic, when the viewer has to complete the journey that the artist has nudged you towards. You either get it or you simply think the work is well done and good looking. I get it.
As instructed, look at yourself looking.”
William Hunt
Curator
New York, NY
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”First introduced to the darkroom as a teenager, Joanne Dugan worked early in her career as a professional analogue printer; an experience that continues to inform her artistic practice today. In her latest work, Dugan uses analogue photographic materials to evoke visual renderings of time, space and various states of human consciousness.”
Unseen Magazine
Issue Five
Amsterdam, Netherlands
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“I am very curious about the new work of the American artist Joanne Dugan. What looks like a perfect grid from a distance, turns out to be a series of hand-developed and cut photos. Every image is slightly different. When making the images, Dugan playfully introduces 'unintended' light into the dark room, making the light itself her subject. The rhythms of light and dark make the grids dance before your eyes. The work is inspired by Zen Buddhism and Eastern visual traditions, such as the Indian Yantra and you can feel that. It exudes a meditative peace, but meanwhile these multiples do come from Manhattan. Dugan makes, breathes and lives grids."
Nathalie Maciesza
DE Kunstmeisjes
Amsterdam, Netherlands
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“Meant to be a visual study of the subtleties in imperfection, the grids visually shift after repeated viewings. This focuses our attention on the tension between difference and sameness. What initially appear to be reductivist geometric works is informed by Buddhist philosophy and discipline. Dugan illuminates the beauty to be mined from repetition.”
Jody Zellen
Visual Art Source
Los Angeles
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