Opening on Thursday, November 14, SARA'S is delighted to present Wet Shutter, a one person exhibition by Tamen Perez. The show will be on view at 64 Fulton street through December 15, 2024.

“To refuse the shutter is to begin to practice potential history.” - Ariella Azoulay

A series of uncanny images depicts the roof of the artist’s studio building, air vents, and surrounding urban and industrial landscapes. To produce these photographs, Perez uses a handmade lenticular cardboard camera obscura, the lens of which is a magnifying glass. It takes at least five hours for the cyanotype paper inside to register the light required to produce a negative. Next, she rinses the paper to fix the chemicals and then manipulates and reprints the photos.

In the process of alteration and iteration, color and orientation are flipped and swapped and tweaked. While the process of producing positives from negatives typically suggests clear opposition, here none of the iterations are direct reversals or inversions. The results are subtly eerie and often radiant impressions of what have become estranged, unknown landscapes — in portrait mode.

One imagines the instantaneous click or snap of a shutter,but in this process the aperture yawns open for hours at a time, letting light seep and pour in. These are still images containing duration: the slow burning of light onto chemically coated paper; the careful bathing of the prints in water; their subsequent digital rendering and reproduction. Tricks of light, tricks of artistry, splatters and splashes are emphasized in the balancing between care and chance. In the slowness of that image capture, time dilates as a pupil. Perez does not pretend the camera is neutral nor that the artist’s hands are clean and dry.

A series of stretcherless canvases embedded with materials and slick with strata of paint likewise suggest a process of slow accretion. These highly tactile, almost irresistibly touchable works include versions of the photographic prints embedded in their many layers. They also hold plant matter, sewn thread, aprons, a paintbrush, and dead tech — a severed electrical line, a red, spiral-corded telephone. Remnants of studio practice are arrested in motion. Perhaps the camera obscura is wiling away the hours on the pavement just outside the studio, capturing the light passing through the lens as the artist paints.

Frames and edges are elusive, unpredictable, tricky. A line could be the edge of thephotographic paper, the edge of the exposure, the edge of the developing tray, or an edge “artificially” created by software. The base layer for these wet-look paintings is impossible to discern. The photos might be field notes for the paintings, or the paintings might be studies for the photos. The base fabric for one large painting is in fact a fitted bed sheet, corners slit to force the curves flat, like a map of a globe or the skin of a hide. One realizes how image-making forces the world flat, how photographs inevitably collapse space and time, how these flimsy renderings of dimensional experience structure the way we view depth and material. The world cannot be flattened into a hangable image.


TAMEN PEREZ b.1987, Costa Rica) works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where she is a Ground Floor Resident at I.S.C.P. (2023-25). Recent solo exhibitions include Sara’s, New York (upcoming); Marais Moeras, Belgium (2024); Y2K Gallery, New York (2021); and Stadium Galerie, Berlin (2018). Select recent group exhibitions include Blade Study Gallery, New York (2023); Miriam Gallery, Brooklyn (2022); Lyles and King, New York; Horse and Pony, Berlin (2021); Rootcanal, Amsterdam (2019); Between Bridges, Berlin (2018).

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