Jessica Eaton

Jessica Eaton was born in Regina, Canada, in 1977. She studied photography at Emily Carr University and has been represented by galleries including Higher Pictures Generation, M+B, and Bradley Ertaskiran. In 2012 she received a prize at the Hyeres International Festival of Fashion and Photography, and she participated in MoMA’s New Photography 2015: Ocean of Images.^*2

Eaton’s work centers on color as a photographic event, perception, the limits of visibility, abstraction generated inside the camera, and the relation between modernist color theory and photography. Using a large-format camera, simple studio forms, RGB color filters, and repeated exposures, she turns gray cubes in the cfaal series into saturated color structures through additive exposure rather than post-production coloring.^*4 Her process is highly planned and repeatable: she works from notes and predesigned exposure systems, returning to the same angle to focus on the generation of color. Eaton’s statement that she wanted to reject the idea that photography is bound to the visible world points to her interest in how the camera can make visible phenomena beyond ordinary perception, including color generated by light and ultraviolet patterns.^*4 At a time when digital manipulation had become ordinary, her analog exposure systems showed that photography’s abstract and artificial color-making capacities already existed inside the material apparatus of the camera.^*2

Canadian Art has read cfaal as a body of work connecting technical process to philosophical questions about perception and photography. The New Yorker discussed the movement from the cube series to later floral still lifes, emphasizing how repeated color processes overturn photographic realism. Eaton’s work rejects the assumption that the camera is tied to the visible world and redefines photographic truth as an interpretation of light, exposure, film, and perception.^*3