Eileen Quinlan

Eileen Quinlan Plain Jane
Plain Jane, 2008–2019
C-Print
50 x 60 cm
Edition of 8 + 4 AP
4.800 €

„My work is about mortality, fecundity, sexuality, motherhood, domestic Sisyphean cycles, and battling entropy. It is about apertures, openings, holes, ruptures, cataclysms, storms, environmental collapse, mass shootings, and living with the specter of terrorism. (…) It’s full of existential questions about the nature of reality“, writes Eileen Quinlan in an interview. For two decades she has been exploring photography and image production in terms of both technique and content. She uses medium and large format cameras, digital flatbed scanners, and digitally resourced photography to produce nudes, self-portraits, landscapes and still lifes, though the actual exhibition prints usually derive from Polaroid Type 55 film. To engage with the world around her, Quinlan continuously undermines the indexicality as well as the materiality of the photographic – while at the same time incorporating her own conditions of production as a female artist. Plain Jane (2008-2019), her edition for the Kunstverein, depicts the image of a piece of textile and reflective gel hanging overlapped on the wall of her studio. Earlier both elements were used as a backdrop of abstracted objects as part of her Smoke & Mirrows_-series: still life constructions staged on the table top of her studio to negotiate the indeterminate roccoco spaces of advertising photography. By putting the backdrop itself to the centre of the image, _Plain Jane continues those explorations along the staging of the instruments of staging themselves, or here, more specifically of the juxtaposition of form (the fabric, the gel) and formlessness (light). Printed more than ten years after being shot, the title reminds the artists’ future self what she was thinking about at the time of making.

Eva Birkenstock