Eileen Quinlan

New Directions in Photography.

Eileen Quinlan (American, b. 1972).

This piece is final sale and not eligible for return.

The scanner works are made by sliding materials – mostly elements from the photo studio, such as gels, mirrors, screens, plexiglass, fabric and other flotsam – across a flatbed during the scanning process. They reflect an open-ended activity that resides in a zone of play and pushing up against the hard limits of a rigid system. The desktop scanner can only “see” a short distance before falling into blackness. It has a rigid logic of recording, slowly, from top to bottom. It’s a struggle to split the difference between too much movement (the dread cheese of “glitch” art) and not enough (a mute, brutally forensic recording of static scuffed objects). It is a largely accidental process where some composition takes place as little hacks and effects are gradually understood and mobilized with intent. These works – titled after the games our son plays or other references to digital culture – stand for the screen world I face with a mixture of wonder and horror. The scanner has become another camera to me. Each piece is part of a greater ponderous whole, ever in a process of forming and deforming.

—Eileen Quinlan

Eileen Quinlan (b. 1972, Boston) earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2005, and had her first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2009. Her first survey show, Wait For It at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, was held in 2019. Quinlan’s work was recently included in Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman—The Shape of Shape, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020), Objects Recognized in Flashes, a major group exhibition curated by Matthias Michalka at MUMOK, Vienna, alongside Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, and Josephine Pryde (2019), Passer-by at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019), Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018 at the LUMA Foundation in Arles (2018), VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, curated by Christine Macel (2017), and Always starts with an encounter: Wols/Eileen Quinlan, produced by Radio Athènes and curated by Helena Papadopoulos at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (2016). Previously, Quinlan participated in Image Support at the Bergen Kunsthall, What Is a Photograph? at the International Center for Photography, New York, and New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art, along with group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, White Columns, the White Cube Bermondsey, the Langen Foundation, Mai 36, Marian Goodman Gallery, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Paula Cooper Gallery, among others.