Dafna Talmor. The Moving Eye Cannot See

About

Dafna Talmor's second solo exhibition at Sid Motion Gallery, The Moving Eye Cannot See, builds upon her ongoing Constructed Landscapes series. It showcases two newly produced bodies of work that extend the artist's interest in fragmentation, abstraction, hybridity and reconfiguration. More broadly, Talmor's practice explores shifting conceptions of landscape and perspective and mechanisms of image construction and production.

The exhibition opens with an image of a set of islands, originally framed by the balcony windows of the domestic space Talmor stayed in during a private commission she undertook in 2022. Documented at various times of day from multiple angles, slivers of collaged negatives in stacked form seek to capture the complexity and vastness of the landscape in all its hues and variable weather. This new work, like all work in Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes series, is driven by the impossibility of conveying what the naked eye scans expansively when encountering a landscape. By reconfiguring her negatives, Talmor conflates multiple views and temporalities, alluding to the enormity of an all-encompassing first-hand experience of a landscape.

Beyond abstracted representations of landscapes, the commissioned work mirrors proportions of windows that contain spectacular views. Architectural and mathematical details generally rendered inconsequential, become integral to the way the work is literally formed and shaped. These relational decisions are extended further throughout the exhibition bridging time and space both within and beyond the frame. One set of framed work informs the dimensions of the next in a chain of interconnectedness and internalised systems of logic.

Extending the dialogue with architecture, the exhibition includes a multi-panelled site-specific photographic sculpture made in reference to the window panes of the main gallery space. In this case, proportions are relative to the dimensions of the 5x4 enlarger Talmor uses in her London darkroom. Photography has often – and problematically – been described as a window to the world. The window as a portal or a metaphor for another dimension, that frames or limits the view, seems more fitting here.

Images are mediated by external factors – the landscape, the house, the darkroom and the gallery each play their role. Rotations, repetition and shifts in scale invoke a rhythm, inviting viewers to move in, out and around the work. Shifting forms, stuttering lines breaking and reappearing, paradoxically suggest tectonic movement despite their embodied stillness. 

In Talmor’s work, practical and conceptual considerations often coalesce. A hand-built “master” negative is constructed from fragments of up to 29 different source negatives, leading to multiple outcomes. Each image made of collaged negatives expands over time as a set of unique preparatory studies. Doubling as test prints that enable Talmor to see how each image evolves, the studies reveal their edges and the obsessive numbering logged by hand which correlate to the source negatives used in the construction of each image. Once Talmor is content with the composition, the final study becomes the “master” print. Reasserting the multifarious personalities inherent to photography, it is consequently printed and framed as a cropped large-scale iteration or re-fragmented into multi-panelled editions.

In Constructed Landscapes: Addendum, Talmor’s 2020 monograph (designed by Hans Gremmen and published by Fw:Books), served as a catalyst to produce new work that relies on the repurposing and reimagining of redundant source material, a process integral to her practice. Activated through recurring actions performed in the colour darkroom, it extends Talmor’s exploration of voids and negative spaces. Through multiple transitions and reproductions, colour photograms made with collaged book sheets of the monograph, render the original source material — and its connotations — invisible while retaining its indexical trace. By oscillating between negatives and positives Talmor seeks to playfully blur the often-rigid boundaries and reductive relationship imposed on traditional photographic practices. Through this process, a cycle of mechanical reproduction is instigated, eventually coming full circle. The material loops back into book form culminating in a second collaboration with Fw:Books, due to be published in May. Like all the work in the Constructed Landscapes series, analogue glitches and the materiality of the process come to the fore; traces of light leak out to form flares and so-called imperfections — a consequence of the hardware and optics of the darkroom—simultaneously enabling the artist's hand to become more visible.