Strange and Unadorned: Wave Interference Study
In the series, I share a collection of graphite drawings that trace the history of U.S. American photographer Berenice Abbott’s series Documenting Science in relation to historical U.S. political conditions. Abbott’s photographs, taken during the 1940s and the 1950s, were produced while the U.S. was undergoing the frenetic blacklisting of McCarthyism and the onset of the Cold War. Both Abbott and the Photo League were under investigation by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee for communist affiliation. In a tangential and sly response, Abbott turned from a “straight photographic” project of documenting New York’s streets to an indirect and potentially queerer form of documentation: photographic exposures of light waves, in which interference, evasion, disappearances, and antiphase disturb the illusionistic planes within her photographs. By representing these images through drawings, I hope to bring attention to the history of a photographer whose work extended the definition of “documentation” beyond its typical boundaries, and who subtly yet elegantly described the world (both physical and political) she found herself in. In this series of drawings I produced between 2019 and 2020, I in turn reflect on today’s political metaphors of polarization, interference, resistance, and reaction.
![Christopher Squier, Strange and unadorned: wave interference study no. [4, 7, 9, 13, 15], 2020. Graphite on paper. 39 x 27 cm. Courtesy of the artist.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f52860715c9664badeef7ab/1612714523373-KG7TFDMYG1F8K1FXBIJW/1.jpg)
![Christopher Squier, Strange and unadorned: wave interference study no. [4, 7, 9, 13, 15], 2020. Graphite on paper. 39 x 27 cm. Courtesy of the artist.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f52860715c9664badeef7ab/1612714556990-GPE11CJ1EAHIV7QG56HV/2.jpg)
![Christopher Squier, Strange and unadorned: wave interference study no. [4, 7, 9, 13, 15], 2020. Graphite on paper. 39 x 27 cm. Courtesy of the artist.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f52860715c9664badeef7ab/1612714705377-64BX8IKQ62406DD2CHL1/3.jpg)
![Christopher Squier, Strange and unadorned: wave interference study no. [4, 7, 9, 13, 15], 2020. Graphite on paper. 39 x 27 cm. Courtesy of the artist.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f52860715c9664badeef7ab/1612714711995-BGILW8X0I80E9VB3O88K/4.jpg)
Christopher Squier is a U.S. American visual artist whose work analyzes optics and the role of light in contemporary visual culture. His practice draws on research around luminescence and transparency to position vision as a historically altered and politically contentious experience. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, La Fragua Artist Residency, and Untitled Residency. Previous exhibitions include Overhead, afterimage (Untitled Space, Shanghai); The sun is your enemy (R/SF projects, San Francisco); and Saudade: An Intersection of Archives and Art (Expatriate Archive Centre, The Hague), among others. Squier received an MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA in Art from Grinnell College. In 2011, he was an affiliate student at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art in London.
Website: http://christophersquier.com
Instagram: @squierch