Written by Whitney Cole // Candela Gallery
Washington DC-based artist, Caitlin Teal Price has not always been so experimental with the photograph as an object; the artist returned to the tactile process after the birth of her second child led her to seek out a more “WFH”-friendly photographic workflow. In fact, Scratch Drawings is quite a step away from the glistening, tanned beach bodies of Stranger Lives or the cinematic women of Annabelle, Annabelle.
Visually, these career phases can be bridged with a clear passion for photographic structure: light, texture, and color. However, in conversations about the newer work, Price expressed a fatigue with the digital process; there’s significantly less magic with the push of a button than the materialization of the latent image in a dark room bath, or the excitement of having really created a unique object. She wanted to return to a more manual, individualistic process with her works.
After a serendipitous divergence into mark-making, Price began combining her love for light and the intimacy of the mark into the foundation of her work today.
Price’s process begins by combing through seminal photo history books, making gestural tracings of familiar forms that draw her eye. Parallel to this process, Price captures imagery of falling light coming through the old windows of her home on colored papers, creating small backdrops for the fleeting shapes. Next, she returns to the sketches and begins to pair the drawn forms and the captured images. Finally, she makes several studies of these pairings on 11x14 paper, using x-acto blades of varying sharpness to carve into the surface of photographic prints made from the colored light. Eventually, the perfect match is found, and she uses the chosen study as a reference for the larger, unique piece. Each final piece can take up to two months of meditative mark-making with an x-acto.
Over time, the work has evolved from Lego shapes from her sons’ toys to the more abstracted forms we see today. Price has introduced pencil as a way to add more dimensionality to the white of the re-exposed paper, and has begun making an even more conscious effort to allow the markings and the light to weave together and support one another.
Though Scratch Drawings initially feels like a stark departure from the photographic process, it serves more like a deconstructed ode. Each color chosen is a nod to the RGB/CMYK color scale; the scratched textures themselves are pulled from photography’s past; light, the queen of photography, is glorified with a straight portrait.
Written by Whitney Cole // Candela