"Outside the (Magic) Box"

by Maria Porges

I.
Spidery veins of white meander across a field of milky grey. The scale of these pale, wandering fingers is difficult to decipher: are we looking through a microscope or into a telescope?  As it turns out, these riverine lines are, well,  rivers, seen from a plane flying over some of the most astonishing scenery in the world.

In July of 2008, Jessica Skloven traveled to Iceland—a place so far north that the summer sun never really goes below the horizon, day or night. Skloven became fascinated by this constant, crepuscular illumination. At all hours, she photographed the land and water-- from stinking fields of fumaroles to silvery expanses of ocean, from far away and from very, very close.  She recalls that one of the most fascinating things about this island country was that, though small, it didn’t feel that way—since every corner she turned introduced her to something different. She encountered little vegetation (and no living non-human creatures, aside from birds and sheep) on her travels, but Skloven found the harsh and barren landscape to be fantastically complex in terms of its active geology. It was what she had dreamed of: a place devoid of the usual notions of  pastoral, pretty, or romantic. 

Throughout the body of work resulting from this trip, water-- a point of departure in Skloven’s earlier work—still plays an important role. Those delta-like systems of rivers and streams, for instance, are filled with glacier melt: the result of fiery volcanic activity under masses of ice. And in pictures like mirror mirror (2009), the twinned reflection of light on the ocean becomes a vehicle for Skloven to transform a familiar subject into something uncanny.  The angle of the light creates a perspective that suggests we are looking up as we look out, destabilizing any sense of space or scale.

But Skloven’s manipulation extends far beyond the placement of her camera. This sense of unfamiliarity—even instability--  is a deliberate construction, in that the photographic process itself has become a key component in the making of these works. The negative, in other words, is only a point of departure from which each image she creates is translated, in the darkroom, into what we encounter in the gallery. In a very real sense,  the magic takes place long after the picture was taken.

 Skloven used positive film on some days, fully intending to print the resulting images as she would if she were using a negative.  As a consequence, the brilliant colors of Untitled (June 10, 2008) (2009) are a perverse inverse of what she saw through her lens. Still, despite its startling orange hue, it has  the same reductive sparseness of the rest of her images, invoking a desire for the foregrounding of the conceptual. These pictures are both beautiful and enigmatic, demanding  a kind of close and careful examination,  but they reward us for expending time and effort with a sense that we are seeing something that we could never catch a glimpse of otherwise.

II.
ESTRAGON:  I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.—Waiting for Godot, Act I

Though individually compelling, Skloven’s Iceland photographs should be considered as a body of work—a suite,  a symphony, a non-narrative tale told in Beckett-esque phrases. Its internal pacing comes from differences in scale, the use (and absence)of color-- and the titles Skloven invents for each image. Their purpose is not to provide information, exactly, but to provide what she calls “breathing room.” When the title is a date, for example, it’s symbolic rather than literal. Its significance may be broadly accessible—the day something important occurred—or, just as likely, only meaningful to Skloven herself. While this seemingly quixotic approach implies that any title can add meaning that exists outside of our understanding of a work, it can also open up possibilities for the activation of our own imaginations. In a way, by not seeing everything at once, we can see more than we might have ever hoped to.