Meggan Gould

Artist Statement

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Every day, in my studio, I ask the printer: Are you ok? Are you ready to print? Ten seconds later, it spits out a disposable answer, in the form of a standardized test pattern. Over the course of a few months, I respond with my hand, laboring to replicate the marks and form. I’m ok, thanks, I tell the printer, as I sew the form in absurdly magnified response, using ink drained from the printer itself to dye the thread, and my fingers, as I stitch. I am ready, I am ok: I render it permanent, declare that I am firing on all cylinders (nozzles). 

 

My studio practice is a study in playful resistance, an attempt to infuse flexibility—and joy—into the often rigid structures surrounding vision. I am deeply interested in the ways in which corporations shape our use of photographic technologies (from early Kodak to Epson, Adobe, Flickr). So much of the labor of contemporary image-making is grounded in the electronic innards of inscrutable and proprietary machines; I liberate the raw materials and language of vision, and then I labor with them, allowing my hand to confront the machine.

 

I pore over cameras and camera manuals, spanning the last century of photographic making, for the instructional pictograms used on cameras, ostensibly intended to be universally legible: Woman’s head (portrait), Mountains (distance), Flower (macro). Onto glass sheets, with pigment ink, I trace the forms and embellish autobiographical narratives, rendering the final pieces as cyanotypes. Can I tell a story of my life through only these reductive sound bites of suggested visual referents? I am fascinated by the gap between intention and interpretation; I examine the apparatus of vision itself, and the ways in which it subtly conforms and contorts our individual visions.

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Ink is the new lifeblood of photographic practice, replacing the moment of photosensitivity that used to define photographic prints. The pigment inks are proprietary, and intended with narrow purpose: to be sprayed with nuanced delicacy onto inkjet-specific paper, to reproduce photographic imagery with appropriate color accuracy. Instead: I dunk, I splash, I paint, I allow the ink to subsume the objects themselves. Objects of domestic whiteness meet the ink: Q-tips, tampons, tissues, marshmallows, rice, popcorn.… sopping with photographic material, they emerge cheerfully hued, chroma-toxic.  

 

I dye more thread. Stitching and pixels have a lot in common. I scroll through redundant and banal comments on popular photo-sharing internet platforms: Cool Image. Stunning. So wonderfully beautiful. Nice saturation. Perfect contrast. I glean these kernels of (usually insipid, usually complimentary) attention, and I render them permanent, in Epson hues, on expired black and white photographic paper.

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