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Eric William Carroll <essays>

Eric William Carroll: Sunburn
Rochester Art Center
February 16 – March 23, 2008

“If the sun is metaphorical always, already, it is no longer completely natural. It is always, already a luster, a chandelier; one might say an artificial construction, if one could still give credence to this signification when nature has disappeared. For if the sun is no longer completely natural, what in nature does remain natural?”
- Jacques Derrida

Eric William Carroll collects discarded photographs salvaged from local one-hour photo locations. Carefully sifting through the slipper piles of images, Carroll sorts the photographs into common categories—portraits, weddings, travel, and sports/leisure. For his exhibition One Year of Taking Pictures (2006) Carroll cut 1-inch circular holes through the center of each image (where the subject of most amateur photography is located) thus rendering the image anonymous and disfigured. The categorized images are then impaled on long pikes in the gallery like receipts in a local diner, creating a visual bar graph of the frequency of each subject’s occurrence. The resulting stacks not only create a strange visual recording of amateur photography, but an archive of thousands of failed attempts at capturing ephemeral experiences. Each photograph contains stories; people and places rendered mute outside their original context. Carroll’s piece is similar to White Noise (1993) by artist and musician Christian Marclay. In this work, Marclay covers the gallery walls by pining hundreds of found photographs face down. The wallpaper of images reveals only the markings on the backs of the photographs—date stamps, hand scrawled notes, signatures and water stains which give personal context to a hidden images. There is an intense desire to peel up the corner of the photograph and peek at the image behind. The situation creates a frustrating partial narrative for the viewer similar to Carroll’s anonymous image piles. Most snapshots become a souvenir of personal memory, an incomplete experience, not a precise visual record.

Eric William Carroll’s exhibition Sunburn explores both the desire and the futility of recording and recreating natural phenomena. Carroll explores the photographic and art historical cliché of the sunset through found photographs, altered images, and video projections and attempts to recreate the sublime while also acknowledging the impossibility of this activity. Through collecting found photographs, Carroll become interested in the recurrence of the sunsets as subject matter. The sun is a fascinating object to record in that it is uniquely available and constant. People are compelled when witnessing a sunset to record the event, to capture not only the formal beauty but also the experience. While the visual impact of a sunset can translate to an image, the exact experience cannot. The image can only trigger emotions and connections from personal experiences or more likely fall into a disposable formula of associations. However, the image need not be authentic to be effective.

Carroll’s large photo collage Atari Sunset (2007) is created from over 700 found photographs of landscapes and sunsets tiled together to form a composite sunset image. The subject and its construction reference numerous photographic clichés. Included are landscapes, sunsets, and the popular photo collages found at poster shops in shopping malls comprised of hundreds of small thumbnail images which when viewed at a distance create a pixilated larger image. Instead of cutting the center from the found images, Carroll Silk-screened a checkerboard pattern, creating a faux pixelization on the surface of the original image. The reference to pixelization and digital photography is an intriguing contradiction, the digital mimicked upon the analog. The relationship again refers to the desire to recreate what has been lost or replaced. Traditional film photography is quickly disappearing, replaced by digital files stored as bits of data on computer hard drives and in cellular phones. Gone are the hand written notations of time and place, but more importantly, the bad and unintentional photographs. Imperfect photographs are quickly erased with a keyboard stroke, leaving no record of their existence. However, a lingering desire for the analog remains. When digital recording and compact discs replaced vinyl records and analog production soon thereafter, technology was created to mimic the hiss, pops and imperfections of the analog sound, which the digital removed. Digital can be too perfect, and perfection can also be perceived as unnatural, artificial and foreign, similar in nature to the concept eluded to by Derrida at the beginning of this essay.

Sunburn Remix (22:22) consists of a video projection set to an ambient electronic score composed and performed by Carroll. The video is shot from a moving car traveling down a n interstate highway somewhere in the Midwest. Centered in the frame is the setting sun flickering between trees and passing cars in the opposite lane. The intensity of the sun overloads the camera at times leaving a black dot at its core, like a tiny pupil staring back at the viewer. At random intervals a fleshy veil or orange and red blots out the image as the tip of a finger covers the lens. The effect creates a feeling of drifting in and out of consciousness, recalling memories of heavy eyelids at the end of a long car trip. The strength of the piece lies in its ambiguity, as it does not attempt to recreate or capture the essence of the sunset. Instead, it creates an independent experience anchored by past familiarity with the subject. What is compelling in Carroll’s work is not the loaded baggage of its subject matter ore the formal beauty of the work, but its imperfection.

SS

Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (1971), in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 251.