In Rite: This Instant, a modest group show dedicated to Polaroids at Seattle’s Solas Gallery, C. Meier, Annie Reierson, and Jack Johnston explore the artistic potential of the once ubiquitous instant photographic process—Polaroid—in diverse ways. A projected video work by Reierson greets visitors to the gallery, disrupting expectations of scale and style readily associated with the medium, an apt introduction to the varied experiments each artist takes to explore the limits of the medium’s possibilities.
Each artist in Rite: This Instant plays with the definition of what a Polaroid is ordinarily understood to be, challenging the medium by pushing its relationship to scale, the viewer, and time. C. Meier’s works—chromatic abstractions mounted on vibrant sheets of plexiglass—are experiments with form and process. Jack Johnston reprises earlier experiments with a Polaroid SX-70 made as a young artist in San Francisco in the 1970s just after the camera’s introduction. Annie Reierson, the only artist to work in black-and-white, presents photographs that are decidedly more romantic, depicting sweeping landscapes and rural scenes. Working serially, she photographs each scene repeatedly, displaying these images in tight arrays.
Meier’s works, drawn from a new series titled Dire Straights (2024), embrace the potential for accident and chance. In Cyan-Red-Magenta-Yellow (2024), pure geometry and color compete to fill the visual field. Two right-angled triangles of cyan and red fill the frame, while a half circle of yellow overlaps and interacts with the cyan, creating a void of light. A bar of pure magenta floats below, beyond the fray of the chromatic chaos above. Meier’s works create vibrating fields of chroma that recall on a small scale both the direct, emotional intensity of a Rothko painting and the ludic nature of early photograms. They allude, as well, to Barbara Kasten’s Constructs series, which began as experiments with Polaroid in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Made in the darkroom with only the aid of their sense of touch, Meier troubles that association by privileging not the optical but the haptic, and embracing accident and imperfection as aesthetically desirable.
Where Meier pushes at the formal limits of the Polaroid within its frame, Johnston devises a fragmentary approach that exceeds the limits of the camera’s own limited visual field. Embracing an approach akin to assemblage, Johnston creates overlapping arrangements of tightly-framed Polaroid portraits. Each image independently excerpts a fragment of a figure and together, they reconstitute a whole from many separate moments and points of view. In one untitled image, assembled from four radically cropped Polaroids, fragments of the same male figure recur, rendered alternately in color or black-and-white, clothed and nude. There is an impressionistic quality to Johnston’s assemblages, in which immediate impressions drawn from the visual field combine to create a shifting whole that only ever momentarily coheres in the viewer’s subjective perception.
Annie Reierson, Ubiety 01, 2024
Drawn from a new series titled Ubiety (2024), Reierson’s images subvert the Polaroid’s instantaneity by playing with the long interval of time between each new picture necessitated by the Polaroid’s unique design. Working in one place, she makes many consecutive exposures of the same scene, which she presents both as tightly-gridded photographic arrays and stop-motion films. One set of images comprises several studies of a shoreline, while another dwells on a decaying structure under the enmeshed canopies of two massive trees. In her video works, something of the loping character of the earliest experiments in film is recreated by the long intervals enforced between each exposure by the obdurate logic of the mechanisms that enable the Polaroid’s heralded instantaneity. These works extend past the logic of the original Polaroid, reproducing them with the aid of an intermediate technology, much the same way lithography unshackled the daguerreotype from the limits of its own materiality.
Once dismissed by Susan Sontag as little more than a handy, notational form of image-making, Rite: This Instant demonstrates the Polaroid’s ability to open an alternate future for the field of photography rooted in a truly analog and haptic experience. Though initially popularized for its convenience, the Polaroid’s unique character nonetheless returns photography to an earlier logic, in which each image was unique and irreproducible. This is the logic of the daguerreotype, one of the earliest and most cumbersome of photographic processes. For me, these works mark a necessary return to the past, a degrowth that offers a much-needed foil to so many exhibitions on view elsewhere in the city. Intimate and singular, they invite connection and demonstrate the wealth of possibility available in even modest mediums.
Each photographer’s decision to work with Polaroids in the present marks a critical return to an earlier moment in photography’s past that was more resistant to capitalist logics of reproduction that tie photography inextricably to market forces. In doing so, these works, and the exhibition at large, offer not only an alternative to the increasingly alienating character of our digital image world, but challenge an overheated art market, in which more and bigger is often thought best. Instead, they demonstrate the value and beauty of small-scale, singular, and even obsolete modes of image-making.
Rite: This Instant
Solas Gallery, Seattle, WA
January 2 – February 15, 2025