Contact Sheets by Parsley Steinweiss

Contact Sheets
8"x10"($20) | 11"x14"($50) | 16"x20" ($200) | 24"x30" ($1000)
by
Parsley Steinweiss

Wednesday greetings, collectors! I'm glad to be back! With all my recent dashing around the country and lots of exciting news here at JBP, time has simply flown by faster than I can believe. It seems just yesterday that we were mulling over the work of today's edition-maker, Parsley Steinweiss at the 2009 First Edition Hey, Hot Shot! panel, and now here we are with Contact Sheets for you on 20x200!

Soon after that, Parsley was named one of our five Hot Shots and we were able to see her work on the walls of the gallery, where the pages that comprise Contact Sheets became even more material. If you haven't seen them in person, you must: they are amazing. In fact, I went back to the gallery to revisit the prints several times, captivated by how different the digital version was from the printed photograph, thinking that I'd really like to own one myself!

Parsley is also amazing—after meeting her in person, I can say that she more than lives up to her name! She is also a dedicated collector of both object and print material just like I am and if you've seen my apartment, you know that books and magazines are piled up in every crevice of my living space. So, upon seeing Parsley's Stacks, which befittingly take their name from their macro-view of the books, papers, magazines, journals, sketchpads and photographs in her abode, I felt an instant kinship.

Contact Sheets, specifically, brings up another personal obsession: the photograph as an object, and the murky line that lurks between. Each of the individual sheets in Parsley's "stack" is a two-dimensional object and record of her own creative history. She has compiled the sheets, with various edge color, tension and thickness, into a three-dimensional pile, then photographed and had them beautifully printed into the image you see here. In one sense, a greater distinction is created between the image and the original contact sheet because the photograph is no longer identifiable in its first form. From another angle, the distance between the object and image is diminished by the return to a print as a single sheet of photo paper—that which was originally stacked.

And so we open up a debate about the transposition of the thing into an image of the thing. In our recent Summer Reading exhibition at the gallery, we looked at the book as art object, the object (books) as photograph, and the object transformed into two dimensions to be used as the medium for the art. Each of these pieces, as with Parsley's, reveals a great duality in photography: the image is more than a representation of the object, and the object is more than is apparent in the image.

As you can see, we could go on and on with this discussion! But I'll instead leave you with this poem from Wallace Stevens, who also immerses himself in the eternal debate between the idea and the thing itself:

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

       —Wallace Stevens