Liz Deschenes likes to decouple her instagram feed from the urgency of the now by often posting images of shows or work from the past. So it took me a moment to realize that this show at the George Eastman Museum, posted with curator Phil Taylor, is on right now, from January through August.
Frames Per Second (Silent) gets its title from a body of photogram-based works Deschenes made that transmute the framerate of cinema to architectural space. When she showed them at Miguel Abreu in 2018, the viewer’s movement through the gallery flickered across the uniform photograms’ surface like a zöetrope, or a motion study of Étienne-Jules Marey.
In Rochester, the photograms are syncopated, and of varying width within a work, a reference to the variable frame rates of silent film. [This 2015 essay by Nicola Mazzanti on about variable archival frame rates and the transition to digital cinema projection is as thoughtful and detailed as anything you’d find on David Bordwell’s blog. It sounds like silent film frame rates, cranked by hand at 16, 20, or up to 30 fps, varied even within a single film, and for a variety of reasons, including content-driven aesthetic choices. Deschenes’ variations reflect that (sic).]
But the show also contains other works, including a monochrome on Gorilla glass, and—ngl, this is what pushed me to post—a set of dye transfer monochromes. I love the way they’re installed, on a little shelf, with a sheet of glass pinned over them. It’s an elegant an unobtrusive solution for these fragile objects of saturated color. A road trip is in order.
[next morning update: Liz responded to point out these are new dye transfers made with the Kodak dye transfer dye on Epson papers. Anachrony is one of her mediums.]
Liz Deschenes: Frames Per Second (Silent) 18 Jan – 17 Aug 2025 [eastmanmuseum]
Previously, somewhat related: an 18-min video from Zwirner of the laborious process of making a dye transfer print, by Eggleston’s dye transfer folks