Looking closer, the viewer discovers brush strokes on the cubes, and realizes that these aren’t digital constructs, but honest-to-god photographs of physical objects. Cfaal 1042, 2018īut after absorbing the simplicity of the work, the viewer is then carried away by waves of subtlety and nuance: the brilliant colors, the pitch-perfect proportions, the alternating sense that the cubes are rising outward or falling away. The images show cubes within cubes, set on a simple plane against a flat background. It was Lewitt who said that if you want to make art about an idea, you have to pick the simplest form and repeat it until the form loses meaning and the idea becomes the art.

The series, called “Cubes for Albers and Lewitt,” draws inspiration from the great twentieth-century abstract artists Josef Albers and Sol Lewitt. Everything was organized around a few basic wooden cubes painted in various shades of grey-her sole subject for nearly three years. The blackout curtains were pulled back from the tall windows in her studio, letting in the last light of the day, which reached almost to the back wall. I dropped into her studio just after the new year, where I found her kicked back at her desk with a glass of red wine, taking a break from frenzied preparations for an upcoming show in Los Angeles. I hardly stand a chance, but she’s game to try. She operates so far out on the fringes of technical complexity, even serious professional photographers struggle to grasp how she does it, let alone a mere enthusiast like me, slinging a Nikon D700 around in my backpack and half the time shooting on Auto. Cfaal 1036, 2018Įaton’s pictures seem to be taken from another universe, so for most viewers, it comes as a shock to realize they are analog photographs.

Viewers and collectors are drawn to the unique tensions in Eaton’s work: the austere minimalism coupled with her daring colors the hyper-abstraction undercut by a current of playfulness the defiant impenetrability softened by an aura of warmth. She’s represented by galleries in Montreal, LA, and New York, where she exhibits her work by turns on a bi-annual basis. Through obsessive experimentation, she has developed a method entirely her own, combining additive colour theory and what she calls “a really bastardized version of Ansel Adam’s zone system.”Įaton’s relentless inventiveness and exacting practice have made her one of the most successful Canadian artist-photographers working today. The Montreal-based artist has been working in the arcane reaches of analog photography for over 14 years. Jessica Eaton has a problem: people always want to know how she makes her photographs, but few are capable of understanding the explanation.

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