Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran is pleased to present Transmutations, celebrated Canadian artist Jessica Eaton’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Using a large-format analogue camera, Jessica Eaton interrogates the ontological nature of the medium of photography, deconstructing it to its basic components and reorganizing it into compelling new forms.

Eaton will be exhibiting excerpts from three new bodies of work. Pictures For Women, an homage to female artists, celebrates examples of their work seen through Eaton’s manipulation of the technical aspects of a camera. Building on earlier works such as cfaal 18 (mb RGB), where Eaton experimented with the controlled use of motion blur by moving the film, she is now building kinetic sets. The subject set in motion becomes a dance for the camera’s eye. Pictures from the Revolutions series build on these kinetic set-ups, in this case using monochromatic grey scale patterns designed by Eaton and recorded often with her signature experiments that create colour by RGB additive separation techniques. The series Transition follows her series Cubes For Albers and LeWitt as a body of work structured by modular methods of production based on a fixed set of variables. These works investigate further strategies for additive separation colour production and increasingly complex optical experiments.

Bound to her interest in colour theory, the science of optics, the human vision system and the history of photography, Eaton’s experiments challenge the medium as a surrogate for seeing. Her photographic experiments are a metaphoric and poetic exploration of how we perceive reality, imagining other ways of processing our world of information.

Jessica Eaton (b. 1977, Regina, Saskatchewan) received her BFA from the Emily Carr University in Vancouver. Solo exhibitions include Wild Permutations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland; Flash: Jessica Eaton at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside; and Ad Infinitum, The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Eaton has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Under Construction – New Positions in American Photography, Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; Process and Abstraction at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station; Color Acting: Abstraction Since 1950 at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida; Québec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Photography is Magic, Daegu Photography Biennale. Eaton was nominated this year for the prestigious Sobey Art Award. In 2015, Eaton was selected by the Capture Photography Festival to create a major public art commission for the city of Vancouver. Notable press includes The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, ARTnews (cover) and The Guardian. Her work can be found in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, among others. Jessica Eaton lives and works in Montréal.

To consult the artist’s profile, please click here