Daniel Eatock

Switch the Dark Off
ink-jet prints from digital photographs
40” x 60”

This work is comprised of three, high-resolution digital color photographs that depict the empty (white) gallery walls illuminated by the track lights at exactly 100% scale. Deceptively simple, the photographs generate a range of complex phenomenological effects that take Eatock’s strategies to an extreme. Illuminated by the very gallery lights that they depict, the three photographs materialize the relationship between the surface of the blank wall and the light rays they both absorb and reflect. The live event of the light hitting the gallery wall fuses seamlessly with a prior impression of this same activity, stilled and documented by the camera. The piece suggests a Borgesian map of the world draped over the territory it describes. The faithfulness of this one one-to-one relationship, however, is enriched by the fact that it also includes the light that made it visible as well the element of time. The pictures that seem to be absent on the wall are actually present, camouflaged by the environment they record. Richard Torchia