William Baffin Rose

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The floral subjects of Bruce Checefsky’s Garden Series are familiar, but the artist’s unusual image-making process dissociates them from their natural context. Rather than use a camera with a lens, Checefsky customized an Epson optical scanner, reducing the device to its essential components. To create a photograph, he effectively “scans” scenes in his garden, with each horizontal exposure lasting about one minute. Occasionally, a flower or leaf is caught by the scanning bar, causing a linear blur effect—the artist describes this blur as “an ‘utterance’ of technology in dialogue with the natural world.” Checefsky’s method relates to Eadweard Muybridge’s multi-exposure motion studies, also made with custom equipment, which trace the passage of time during the moment of photographic capture (two of Muybridge’s studies are included in the exhibition).

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