{"id":310,"date":"2010-03-02T16:19:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T21:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/?page_id=310"},"modified":"2012-05-09T21:01:38","modified_gmt":"2012-05-10T01:01:38","slug":"ellen-carey-20x24-polaroid-pulls-and-rollbacks-part-2-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/?page_id=310","title":{"rendered":"Ellen Carey 20×24 Polaroid Pulls and Rollbacks, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the more unique artists working with Polaroid 20×24 technology today is Ellen Carey. Ellen first began using the 20×24 in 1982 while it was housed at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. Ellen’s first work was a series of self portraits, lit with colored gels and later painted with enamel paint. These evolved into another series of self portraits made in New York that combined close up portraits lit with colored gels with intricate collages of black and white graphic images.
\nThese multiple exposures blended the abstract and narrative in compelling complexity. In the 1990s Carey moved on to produce the series of “Pulls” and “Rollbacks”. Eliminating the figure altogether, Carey created these abstract images taking full advantage of the camera as a printmaking machine. Exploiting the roll film nature of the system, Carey produced pieces sometimes seven to ten feet in length by letting the camera run beyond its usual stopping point. At times, the positive would be cut away from the negative and “rolled back” into the camera for additional exposures and developing.
\nHere is an excerpt from the essay “Ellen Carey from Matrix to Monumental”, by Ben Lifson.<\/a>
\nNothing about either Polaroid\u2019s 20 x 24 camera or its positive\/negative material implies abstract pictures; one does not look at them and immediately see a combination of instrument and material ideally suited for the making of abstract art. The idea for the Pulls came to Carey in 1996, as though in a vision, hard upon her discovery of certain properties of the Polaroid materials while working \u201cin a state of mourning\u201d on an originally private symbolic project for the creation of whose symbols–if the panels were to originate in a lens\u2019s depiction of appearances–the camera and materials were, as Carey discovered, the only eligible means.
\n\u201cIt was after I had buried my mother. \u2026I went in [to Polaroid\u2019s Manhattan 20 X 24 studio] to do an object\u2026I had done a sketch of, called Family Portrait, just for myself, of the symbolic sequence of my family at that time, living and dead.\u201d
\nThere being no black-and-white material for the camera then, she used color film, photographing \u201cblack, which was no exposure, representing non-life, death, and white light,\u201d for the living, reflected from a white rectangle. In doing this symbolic sequence\u2026two coal black [panels] for my parents: my father died in \u201979, my mother in April of \u201996, after having lost her middle son,\u201d (Carey\u2019s younger brother John) \u201csix months before. Then two whites for myself and my older brother, black for\u2026 John\u2026then white for my two younger siblings\u2026.\u201d she discovered that \u201cthe negatives were all the same matte black whether they were from black positives or white positives: rectangular voids with a tar-like patina that absorbed light. They resembled open burial pits.
\n\u201cI had this kind of metaphysical experience\u2026Almost slightly out of body. I know that living and dying [are parts of] the same process. We all know this. But here was the physical embodiment of it. I had a little charge, a little shiver down my spine. What Freud would call the \u2018uncanny\u2019.\u201d
\nIn this state of heightened awareness, and on \u201cthe same day, the exact same day,\u201d she discovered the process that led to the Pulls.
\n\u201cWe were shooting and the\u2026positive [white material] was at an end,\u201d with \u201ca little bit of black after it. I [asked] John Reuter,\u201d the director of the Manhattan studio, \u2018what is that?\u2019\u201d
\n \u201c\u2019Oh, it\u2019s just the dyes exhausting themselves, the end of the dyes from the pod.\u2019\u201d
\n\u201c\u2018What happens if we kept on going?\u2019\u201d \u201c\u2019I don\u2019t know\u2019\u201d
\nShe then pulled the paper out of the camera\u2019s rollers past the default length of twenty-four inches, watching the behavior of the dyes \u201cAnd that led to what I would call the first partial Pull, a white rectangle [with] a few inches of black with [a] sort of bib-like line. And I went from that to my first Pull,\u201d in which the dyes, gradually retreating from the paper\u2019s edges, form the parabolic shape central to so many subsequent pictures.
\n\"\"
\nContinue to: Ellen Carey, 20×24 Polaroid Pulls and Rollbacks, Part 1<\/a>
\nSee full essay by Ben Lifson, “Ellen Carey, Matrix to Monumental”.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the more unique artists working with Polaroid 20×24 technology today is Ellen Carey. Ellen first began using the 20×24 in 1982 while it was housed at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. Ellen’s first work was a series of self portraits, lit with colored gels and later painted with enamel paint. … Continue reading Ellen Carey 20×24 Polaroid Pulls and Rollbacks, Part 2<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-310","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1652,"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/310\/revisions\/1652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/20x24studio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}