Eileen Quinlan

Eileen Quinlan is an American photographer born in 1972. She participated in MoMA’s New Photography 2013, and her work is held by institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum. Known for studio practice with medium- and large-format cameras, she has shown internationally through institutions and galleries including Miguel Abreu Gallery.^*1

Quinlan’s themes include photographic abstraction, illusion, feminist material culture, motherhood, the body, surface, and the instability of photographic evidence. Her methods combine medium- and large-format cameras with studio still life, mirrors, smoke, Mylar, gels, flash, expired film, Polaroid materials, scanning, and digital coloring.^*1 In Smoke and Mirrors, reflected smoke and broken mirrors disclose the constructed nature of the image while producing atmospheric abstraction. In MoMA’s New Photography 2013, works such as Sophia and Laura used folded yoga mats, expired black-and-white film, scanning, and digital color in relation to feminism, material culture, and references including Judy Chicago.^*2 By using analog and hybrid processes in an age of proliferating digital images, Quinlan shows that photographic abstraction is not outside reality but produced through staged material contact, failure, and chemical instability. Her practice belongs to a 2000s and 2010s resurgence of experimental photography, when photography’s indexical, sculptural, performative, and painterly status was being actively reconsidered.^*3

MoMA frames Quinlan’s abstraction through feminist history and material culture, a reading that has shaped later interpretation. The Art Institute of Chicago’s account of Broken Figure emphasizes motherhood, the manipulation of Polaroid, and the obstruction of the viewer’s gaze. Rather than presenting abstraction as pure formalism, Quinlan’s photographs show how abstract images can carry social, bodily, and feminist histories embedded in objects and photographic materials.^*1