Amanda Marchand
Re: Touch, The Arithmetics of Distance
Re: Touch, the Arithmetics of Distance, "2020 About five years ago, while moving studios, some experimental tests of ink on film were filed, then forgotten in the shuffle. This February 2020, I found them in a manilla envelope and, curious to see them for the first time, sent them to be scanned. By mid-March, the Covid-19 Pandemic was, in devastating proportions, beginning to throttle NYC, preceded by Wuhan, China, Italy, and others. I got the scans back on March 15, a day after all NYC schools were closed by Governor Cuomo, and just as alarming numbers of sick and dying began to roll in. I did not intentionally set out to make these images, so part of my fascination with this project as I have continued to work on it, has been with the strange alchemy of creativity itself. How something you begin five years prior, can sit patiently, like a seed, until the right moment. I am using antique-photo “re-touching” inks and analog photo slides. Social distancing has meant that we now cherish and ache for human touch more than ever... The process of dropping ink from a dropper onto these slides is not unlike testing for pathogens on treated medical slides. In photography, these inks are traditionally used to erase flaws that occur naturally in analog photography, touching up a “perfect print”. Here, alternately, the ink is a stain or blotch. More broadly, these images evoke our vulnerable planet, and invisible forces acting on our land, air, water, and physical bodies. These images echo back, with uncanny prescience, this brave new world.
