FRANK GILLETE: SPECTRA OBSCURA AT MICROSCOPE

FRANK GILLETE: SPECTRA OBSCURA AT MICROSCOPE

The Symbiotic Blues (2017-22)

For Gillette, ecology has never limited itself to the natural world, for it also includes media ecology, which is the idea that technological systems give rise to awareness and eventually create new cultures. The title nods to the camera obscura, the first instrument known to render the world as an image. 

The clearest expression of the idea is found in The Symbiotic Blues (2017-22), which consists of nine channels spread over three pieces, each channel being a different length so that the combinations never repeat. Gillette shot all nine channels around the woodlands and beaches of eastern Long Island, and he’s described being immersed in that environment as a kind of data bank for the exchange between nature and culture. Mirrors show up constantly, propped on sand and among trees to throw off your sense of depth. The broken ones read as a direct statement about how fragile the whole system is. 

The work involving still images is more strange: Chthonic Chimera (1987), which was created using one of the very few 20x24 inch Polaroid cameras that was ever made, puts together shells, coral, butterfly wings and insects to form compositions that look like specimen cases constructed by someone who doesn't care about taxonomy.

The oldest work is the quietest one. Rio Grande River Bed (1974) presents 81 Polaroids of a cracked riverbed in a grid format: there is no sound, no movement, and nothing to decode. Fifty years on, it functions less as documentation than as a warning that went unheeded.

-Anshuta Jadhav