Craigslist Darkrooms
2012-13

inkjet on coated bond
lightjet prints mounted on Dibond aluminum

Text by Jayne Wilkinson (2012):

Kate Henderson establishes a concern for the orientation of materials, both historically and contextually, that recognizes the fluidity of technologies often considered obsolete in artistic process. Taken from an on-going body of work, Henderson’s two large-scale prints are digital images of darkroom timers found for sale on Craigslist and subsequently enlarged several times over to produce an intentionally degraded image, which is then printed using analogue processes. Collapsing together the digital and the analogue, the works take stock of the legacy of the photographic by showing not simply the material remains of the analogue process but the ways that new and old technologies are mutually implicated in one another. 

Artist Statement (2012):

I am incredibly fascinated by the recent phenomenological switch from analogue to digital in photographic practices. My artistic practice and research has focused on the impending demise of the analogue photographic apparatus. I was trained in the rigorous environment of black & white and colour darkrooms, but my recent work has changed direction away from traditional processes towards the Internet, found photography, and installation. I have been appropriating hundreds of low resolution digital photographs of outmoded darkroom supplies and equipment for sale on Craigslist from cities around the world for Craigslist Darkrooms. In the Fall 2012 MFA Open Studios at UBC, I displayed 240 8.5”x11” Craigslist prints in a grid which covered my entire studio. In tandem with this obsessive foraging for digital detritus, I have been purchasing red and amber darkroom safelights from Craigslist for a recent light installation titled Illumination Study, which bathes the tomb-like space of the MFA Studios’ old chemical-infused darkroom in an eerie, warm red light. Illumination Study and Craigslist Darkrooms are ongoing projects; everyday I scour Craigslist with the goal of collecting thousands of photographs and multiple lights.

These projects reflect my current research and interest in the imminent death of film as digital media advances. Informed by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin’s writings on photographic materiality, death, and technology, I am quickly gaining a solid theoretical support for my increasing interest in this notion of obsolescence and the ruin. Accordingly, in my practice I equate obsolescence to death, thus my work anthropomorphizes the analogue apparatus. Indeed, this process sheds light on what was once a lively, thriving practice. A catalogue of visual epitaphs, my recent work expresses an anxiety for the loss of analogue and a disenchantment with modern technology as much as it embraces the anti-aesthetic of the quickly traveling compressed JPEG. This contemporary trope exemplifies the de-skilling of photography, a subject which I choose to contrast with the solid materiality of traditional photographic practices.