Curated by Fionn Meade

The photo-based works of Tamar Halpern do not sit comfortably within any given category. Deploying almost every photo-based technique including scanning, photocopying, and darkroom printing, as well as more painterly misuses of such media-Halpern creates explosive and transfixing sites of mimetic mayhem. After submitting a given photograph to her complex series of reproductive operations, primarily enacted via scanner and photocopying, images are printed in strips as wide as her printer will allow, and then taped together in three parts to form a whole. A series of both additive and subtractive painterly procedures, reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism, the indexical aftermath of Viennese Actionism, and the gestural, silkscreen paintings of Christopher Wool, further reduces the image to a state of hypnotic unintelligibility, transforming it into a palimpsest full of shifting and colliding planes, fashioned out of digital and manual techniques. Ink-jet printer ink is then poured on and gradually removed with solvents, swathes of cloth, and brushes, subjecting the images to further exploitation before they are parceled back together. Unsettling, the work is rife with carnal and visceral evocations. Indeed, if, according to Walter Benjamin, Atget photographed Paris like it was the scene of a crime, then Halpern's works could almost be considered direct witnesses to the act or even crimes themselves. Second Hand, 2010, for instance, which features a half-smeared, asymmetrical pour of red ink on an abstract, black-and-white image, lends itself to a distinctly sanguinary if not scatological reading. Other works, such as The Brain of the Dog, 2010- a strenuous welter of yellow and red smears on a beleaguered black-and-white ground would almost seem to be an extruded version of its title's contents. But if a reluctant "almost" attends any figurative qualification bere, it's because Halpern's practice seems to be deliberately courting a Bataillian l'infonne (formless) sensibility. Its nuanced resistance to, exploitation, betrayal, and revelation of the reproductive technologies it uses speaks to something essentially unwieldy, not to mention unsolvable, at the very heart of those technologies.

-Chris Sharp

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