Jessica Eaton

Exhibition: Time On A Bottle

Dates: May 7 - July 2, 2022

Opening: Saturday, May 7, 2022 (6 - 8pm)

Higher Pictures Generation is pleased to present Time On A Bottle by Jessica Eaton. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Eaton has methodically interrogated the additive theory of color in photography. But when COVID lockdown and curfews hit her home city of Montréal, Eaton suddenly lost access to everything that was necessary to produce her intensive Cubes for Albers and LeWitt photographs. Alone at home, the artist took to the bottle; at the same time, she devised a new system of painting with light that allowed her to work in the solitary conditions that the pandemic imposed.

While Cubes relied on in-camera multiple exposures to develop carefully composed color experiments—a dissection of the Harris Shutter Effect—this new series, Natura Morta (Luce Danzante), takes the photographic cliché of “light painting” and examines it within a defined set of parameters, pushing the effect to its most controlled extreme and completely transforming the genre’s typical aesthetic. By photographing glass bottles on a mirror and white backdrop, Eaton is able to build a full tonal range of subtle hues through the additive mixing of various colored light sources. The “dancing light” is beautifully evident within the photographs but also refers to the athleticism required of the artist during their making.

Eaton’s translucent forms diffuse the light like stained glass, evoking Gaudí’s experiments with trichromy for the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca. In Natura Morta (Luce Danzante), Eaton formulates a typology of color theory; the object—photographed over and over—remains the same, but each image reflects a new, meticulous construction of color. The bottle is both a tongue-in-cheek nod to Giorgio Morandi’s classical still lifes and a toast to Moyra Davey’s Empties, down to the last drop.

Jessica Eaton (b.1977, Regina, Saskatchewan) received her BFA in photography from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. Recently Eaton’s work was selected for the International Photo Festival in Miyota, Japan (2018) and the 2017 Canadian Biennial at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. A solo exhibition of her work is forthcoming at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and other solo exhibitions include Wild Permutations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; Flash: Jessica Eaton at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside; and Ad Infinitum at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. Her work can be found in the public collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Saint Petersburg, Florida, among others. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019). Eaton lives and works in Montreal.

For more information please contact Marina Chao at marina@higherpicturesgeneration.com.