EILEEN QUINLAN / Under Water
May 22 – September 20, 2024
Under Water includes thirteen photographic works that span ongoing series in Eileen Quinlan's creative practice. Through a meticulous examination of contemporary environmental and political conditions, Quinlan’s abstract works of decaying analog film and recontextualized appropriated imagery, explore themes of propaganda and spectacle, celestial and natural environments, and domestic narratives.
Header image: An Aperture, 2017, © Eileen Quinlan, Courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
© Eileen Quinlan, Courtesy Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
Quinlan’s images are often sourced from the internet or her personal 35mm film archive: gunshots in a Paris storefront window, galactic and ethereal images from NASA’s telescopes, the underbrush of Wayland Woods, and distant desert landscapes. They are printed out, rephotographed with a 4x5 view camera, scanned, and manipulated by hand in the artist’s studio. In the multiple reiterations and transformations of format, Quinlan disrupts the original context thereby articulating a new syntax – drawing connections between geopolitical conversations and personal narratives of domestic life, entropy, and the artist’s body.
From works incorporating outdated and degraded Polaroid film to the residual hairs and glitches of a glass flatbed scanner, Quinlan's work underscores the materiality of the photographic medium itself. Each image bears the marks of her creative process as deliberate scratches and chance chemical reactions add layers of visual nuance to the images and demonstrate her embrace of imperfections and unpredictability. Her intimate engagement with process, including hand-manipulating negatives and chemical developers, underscores the tactile and emotive nature of her practice and speaks to the presence of the artist's body as both conduit for transformation and creator of illusion.
About the Artist
Eileen Quinlan earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2005, and had her first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2009. Her first survey show, Wait For It, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, was held in 2019. In the fall of 2020, Quinlan’s sixth solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery, Dawn Goes Down, was presented concurrently with Displacements and Dead Trees, a two-person exhibition with Cheyney Thompson. Quinlan’s work was included in Changes, mumok, Vienna (2022–23); Warhol, People and Things, Casa São Roque, Porto, Portugal (2022–23); Invitational Exhibition of Visual Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman— The Shape of Shape, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020), Objects Recognized in Flashes, a major group exhibition curated by Matthias Michalka, mumok, Vienna, alongside Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, and Josephine Pryde (2019); Passer-by, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, LUMA Foundation, Arles (2018); VIVA ARTE VIVA, the 57th International Art Exhibition, curated by Christine Macel, Venice Biennale (2017); and Always starts with an encounter: Wols/Eileen Quinlan, organized by Radio Athènes and curated by Helena Papadopoulos, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens (2016). Previously, Quinlan participated in Image Support at the Bergen Kunsthall, What Is a Photograph? at the International Center for Photography, New York, and New Photography 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art, and in other group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, White Columns, the White Cube Bermondsey, the Langen Foundation, Mai 36, Marian Goodman Gallery, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Paula Cooper Gallery, among others.
Quinlan’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Pinault Collection, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Ackland Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, V–A–C Foundation, Moscow, mumok, Vienna, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, FRAC Normandie Rouen, Brooklyn Museum, and The Art Institute of Chicago.