Distance of Desire.

Smokestack Gallery

March 2 - April 6, 2023

Curated by Tara Westerman

Color . . . is a kind of bliss . . .like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell.’

– Roland Barthes

Photo-based artist Jessica Thalmann advances the limits of photography both formally and conceptually. Working within the space between 2-dimensional representation and 3-dimensional form, her solo-exhibition, Distance of Desire, presents a new body of work that offers her latest investigations into how color influences image perception and object experience.

The large-scale photographs, wall mounted reliefs and free-standing sculptures of this exhibition have been informed by Thalmann’s intrigue in rudimentary architectural forms and their adjoining capacity to manipulate color and light. Approached through the camera lens, the expansive stairwells, glass enclosures and institutional spaces of her subjects are flattened into abstracted compositions of intersecting geometric fields. Through her use of specialized paper folding techniques, a flat print then takes on a new kind of objecthood again; an image of captured light as it slips over a stairwell is transformed into a unique physical form able to bend light and color in real space and time itself.

Realized in a range of dimensionality, it is Thalmann’s meditations on color experience that have ultimately catalyzed creation of works that ask to be both visually contemplated and physically addressed. For Thalmann, color is not just a singular sensation to be passively seen, but rather a multi-sensorial encounter to be actively pursued.