Top AIPAD Recommendations: Farrah Karapetian at Von Lintel Gallery | GalleryIntell

WATER'S OTHER STATE
By Kristina Nazarevskaia

At this point you should be well-familiar with photograms. From our very first interview with Adam Fuss where he explained his process of placing biological objects (live snakes, rabbit intestines, etc.) directly onto large-scale photo-sensitive paper to create colorful chemical reactions, to Alisson Rossiter and her Richard Serra-inspired monochromes, to Man Ray and some of the first ever experimentations with camera-less photography. This year’s AIPAD Photography Show in New York is full of works by contemporary artists who are further exploring the surfaces and the techniques of this timeless process.

Von Lintel Gallery, now based in Los Angeles, is showing several amazing photograms by a California-based artist Farrah Karapetian who used ice to create her abstractions. The images, titled Slips were really experiments, initially created for an installation titled Rock, Paper, Scissors at the California-Pacific Triennial and shown at the Orange County Museum of Art.

In an interview with galleryIntell Farrah explained that she has been using transparent materials like resin and glass in her photograms since 2007. Primarily because they allowed her to achieve a different level of detail, volume and surface than solid objects. She turned to ice because of the desire to emulate various rock surfaces and found the medium to be generous in its abundance of air bubbles and surface irregularities. The process involved recording the shape of the object using her color enlarger, cutting it out and adhering the rock-shaped image onto the wall to create a semblance of the ruins.

As the ice cubes began to melt, this shift from a solid state into a liquid one, this “swishing revolt” as she called it, was the “happy material accident” the artist was ready to accept. The images that eventually made it into the present series were the ones that she “could learn from and ones that could hold their page compositionally.” Naturally drawn to warm colors I asked about the origin of the glowing ochres in several of the images. How did she achieve this color? It turned out that the inspiration came from the Anasazi ruins located in southern Nevada, Utah and Colorado. She called the color “Anasazi Gold.”

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