Liz Deschenes Explores Photographic Materiality in London Exhibition

Liz Deschenes creates photograms using silver-toned gelatin prints exposed at night, often outdoors, which continue to oxidize during display. Her works, such as Bracket 1, 2, 3, and 4 from 2013, are parallelogram-shaped prints mounted on aluminum, featuring darkly reflective surfaces with tarnished silvers, lead, and pewter tones. These pieces evoke twilit horizons and cloud ranges through dim swirls of black-blues and faded verdigris. Deschenes, active since the 1990s, is part of a generation including Wolfgang Tillmans, Walead Beshty, Gerard Byrne, Broomberg & Chanarin, and Michael Part, who investigate light-sensitive paper's properties without focusing on lenses or image-making. Her installations engage with surrounding architecture, as seen in Bracket 5, a concave mirror in a display case that warps viewers' reflections. The artist's meditative approach references analogue photography's decline amid digital culture, yet her chemical experiments emphasize light and matter's tangible traces. The exhibition was reviewed in ArtReview's January & February 2014 issue.