ED ATKINS

Central to the exhibition is Passive Mech, a timelapse film that documents the gradual deterioration of a cardboard sculpture suggestive of a rudimentary stage set. Installed outside the artist’s summerhouse in Zealand, Denmark and shot through his young daughter’s bedroom window at a rate of one frame per minute over the course of a month, Passive Mech comprises 43,200 exposures and innumerable collaged audio clips that capture both the turn of winter to spring and the central structure’s eventual failure. Though the set remains largely unpopulated, its inevitable decay functions as an apt proxy for timelapse’s most common subject: growth and death in the natural world. Dramatizing Roland Barthes’ assertion that every photograph depicts something posthumous, Passive Mech grants the camera authority of vision, examining with both mechanical precision and painful intimacy how images simultaneously preserve and succumb to the moments they depict. Rear projected onto the far end of a black boxlike structure, the installation doubles the dramaturgical precepts of the film — an inversion of the cardboard stage set, to conjure cinema, theatre, cockpit, bedroom: spaces of voyeurism, passivity and fantasy.

Literalizing the conceptual concerns central to Passive Mech is a series of unique photographs gleaned from the film’s vast constituency of stills. Printed and mounted in a range of scales and styles to quietly reference photography’s various modalities, these images straddle the strangely imperceptible distance between vernacular photography and its art-world cousin, slipping across the barricades meant to quarantine the quotidian from the canonical. Atkins also presents a series of reliefs, in which domestic debris like cardboard breakfast cereal boxes and animal flashcards are stripped from the realm of industrial ubiquity and turned into assemblages that capture quietly shared moments between the artist and his children. Mirroring Passive Mech’s interest in the confines and functions of timelapse photography, these objects are presented as records that mark the period of their collaborative making. Framing a series of images whose import is otherwise unavailable, these objects remind us once again of the complications implicit to photography and its cascade of ambivalent promises. The reliefs are shown alongside a group of frottages that trade photography’s light for the unmediated contact of touch. The resulting 1:1 scaled images of family bed linens rendered in graphite offer themselves as a perfect photonegative record of both the objects they duplicate and the sleeping bodies their subjects obscurely index.