Birgit Blyth at Carrie Haddad

Blyth, Marathon Series 1, 2015

We've been waiting a good number of years to find a moment to write about Birgit Blyth and the fault is all ours.  Today we're correcting it.  Her pictures in the current group show at Carrie Haddad Gallery in the upstate hamlet of Hudson, New York, on display until February 14, are powerful, crisp, elegant pictorial statements that will make us want to reconsider all her previous work.  We should have seen this coming.

Blyth, Marathon Series 2, 2015

Blyth, Marathon Series 3, 2015

Some background: Birgit has been working quietly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, since the 1970s.  She began in printmaking, then conventional photography, gradually migrating to alternative photography, pinholes, cyanotypes, van dyck browns, doubtless to other niche methods as well.  Her interests may seem fractured but each was given time to develop and bear fruit before she moved on; in hindsight the trajectory made sense.  She was learning and did what many of us do: she visited museums, she absorbed Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, Brice Marden, Terry Winters - it's good to be infatuated with the best - and each left a mark on her.  She did residencies in Johannesburg, South Africa, 9 years running, and met William Kentridge.  Then at some point a friend showed her the article by Dominic Man-Kit Lam and Bryant Rossiter in Scientific American (November 1991) entitled 'Chromoskedasic Painting' and her artistic life changed forever.

So what exactly is this chromoskedasic painting that Birgit is doing?  Rossiter had derived the term from classical Greek to mean 'color scattering', indicating the mechanism by which the black light of silver grains in photographic emulsion can, if these grains are handled properly, yield a spectrum of yellows, reds, purples, greens and blues that we see in works of the chemigram type.  We've discussed this mechanism, the Mie effect, in the blog here and here and elsewhere.  And make no mistake about it, chromoskedasic painting is a kind of chemigram; Christina Z. Anderson calls it the chromoskedasic extension of the chemigram.  As things have turned out, there is one part of the 'chromo' agenda (to shorten Rossiter's mouthful of a word) that distinguishes it from simple chemigrams, and that is the crucial application of stabilizer and activator to the process, two additional chemicals that act somewhat like a hyper aggressive fixer and developer and help boost both coloration and silvering-out.  In short, if you don't have stabilizer and activator you aren't doing chromo.  For the geeks - I am one but I'll spare you - details on how they are thought to function can be found in the last two chapters of the late William Jolly's book, which is linked in the right-hand sidebar. 

Blyth's pictures then are chromoskedasic paintings, the term she is most comfortable with.  You paint on photo paper with chemicals - a certain palette of chemicals - and you watch and guide what happens.  In the early days she poured the chemicals directly onto the paper, let them flow and drip as in her splendid Veil series; later she resorted to a brush, and finally, recalling her printmaking experience, she went with resists, mostly Elmers glue, rubber cement, and tape, or what we would today call 'soft resists.'  Still, she is far from the world of incisions and mackie lines, the Cordier universe, although she is fine with that and the results prove, for the things that matter most to her, how right she is.

Blyth, Veil No. 29, 2009

Blyth, Veil No. 30, 2009

Blyth, Chromo Grid No. 13A, 2014

Let us now get back to the Marathon series that we led off with.  This series came into being as she was listening on the radio to the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial in Boston.  She had, before her on the workbench, a stack of old prints she'd been thinking about, one quite large, with the gridlike scaffolding she often uses as structure, the dominant lines mostly vertical.  Suddenly, in rage and fury, she tore it up - into smaller pieces, each holding still a memory of the larger one.  She looked at what she'd done and had an idea: I'll paint the torn edges red.  Just a bit, just where the tear was, and I'll make it an orange-red that screams - and that is what she did.  It's at Carrie Haddad.

Blyth, Marathon 4, 2015

Birgit uses all sorts of paper, expired or not, RC or FB, single or double weight, every kind of finish, glossy, pearl, you name it.  The Marathon series was Ilford RC glossy and the individual pieces are 8 x 10" more or less, having been torn down from 20 x 24".  She buys her chromo chemicals from Freestyle.  None of her work is editioned, each piece is unique.  She displays them uncovered - no glass, no plexi.   Sometimes she mounts them on aluminum.  

You have one more week to see this terrific work in person.  The train ride from Penn Station in NYC is two hours. 

Chemigram shows for rest of the year, including some you'll have to travel to

Man-Kit Lam, 2005

For those with a yen for travel, we've gathered a few shows you may want to catch before the year is out.  All include chemigrams either solely or in part or, in Ms Rossiter's case, include what might be called a chemigramic inflection - and for that reason alone they're all worth seeing, besides the utter beauty and mystery of them.  If we've missed your show, please post a comment and we'll fix it.

Pierre Cordier 
Paris Photo, HackelBury Gallery, November 10-13, 2011, Grand Palais, Paris, France

Dominic Man-Kit Lam
Ink Art: a world without rules, September 2011 & February 2012, Novel Plaza, 128 West Nanjing Road, Shanghai, China

Alison Rossiter
Art Platform LA, Yossi Milo Gallery, October 1-3, 2011, LA Mart, Los Angeles, California, USA

Alison Rossiter
Paris Photo, Stephen Bulger Gallery, November 10-13, 2011, Grand Palais, Paris, France

Edward Mapplethorpe
The Variations, October 5 - November 12, 2011, Dubner Moderne, rue du Grand-Chêne 6, Lausanne, Switzerland

Norman Sarachek
Emerging Artists Annual Showcase, November 4, 2011, Allure West Studios, 15 E State St, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, USA

Matthew Higgins
Pingyao International Photography Festival, September 1 - September 30, 2011, Pingyao, Shanxi Province, China

Nolan Preece
Continuitive: Connections Between Parallel Directions, Dec 2011 - January 2012, Truckee Meadows Community College, 7000 Dandini Blvd, Reno, NV, USA

Douglas Collins
New Prints 2011 Selected by Trenton Doyle Hancock, October 3, 2011 - March 28, 2012, Pfizer Corporation, 235 E 42 St, New York, New York, USA

just closed:

Dominic Man-Kit Lam
Sino-French Exhibition of Art Exchange, September 20-22, 2011, National Library Exhibition Center, Beijing, China

Nolan Preece
Xhibit, May 13 to August 27, 2011, Preston Contemporary Art Center, 1755 Avenida del Mercado, Mesilla, New Mexico, USA