MOLLY SPRINGFIELD: Gentle Reader
4TH ANNUAL DC ARTIST SOLO EXHIBITION
OCTOBER 28 – DECEMBER 02, 2006
Transformer proudly presents our fourth annual DC-based artist solo exhibition: Gentle Reader, an installation of work by Molly Springfield.
In 1833, while on honeymoon in Italy, William Henry Fox Talbot tried to sketch the landscape surrounding Lake Como with the aid of a camera lucida. But, in an age in which skill at drawing was highly prized, Talbot was a terrible draughtsman. Despite the beauty of the images, he later recalled, "I found that my faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold." He speculated "how charming it would be to cause these images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper! And why should it not be possible?"
Talbot was a brilliant polymath who made important discoveries in fields as diverse as calculus, astronomy, and the translation of cuneiform texts, but it was his frustration with his inability to capture nature with a pencil that led him to develop what he called 'the art of photogenic drawing'. Among other things, Talbot invented the photographic negative from which positive prints could be made - allowing for the mass reproduction of images. He chronicled these discoveries in The Pencil of Nature (1844), the world's first photographically-illustrated book.
In the Gentle Reader exhibition at Transformer, Molly Springfield draws on Talbot's life and work to create a dialogue between past and present, exploring the liminal territory between reproduction and originality, objectivity and subjectivity, and technology and labor. The result is a unique mix of conceptual drawing, experimental photography, and historical homage.
Gentle Reader includes large drawings based on the introduction to the Pencil of Nature, as well as smaller drawings of photocopies of secondary sources discussing Talbot's photographic discoveries. In addition to these drawings, Springfield presents the results of her own experiments with calotype or Talbotype photography- sepia-toned sunprints of cutouts from The Pencil of Nature and Talbot's personal notebooks. Viewers are also invited to take home letterpress-printed bookmarks specially designed by the artist for this exhibition.
Molly Springfield was born in 1977 and received her M.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. She is represented by Moti Hasson Gallery (New York), Steven Wolf Fine Arts (San Francisco), and Thomas Robertello Gallery (Chicago), where her next solo show opens in April 2007. Springfield wishes to thank all the summer 2006 artists-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she either created or conceived all the work in the Gentle Reader exhibition.