Dafna Talmor — Constructed Landscapes: Addendum

In Constructed Landscapes: Addendum, Talmor’s 2020 monograph Constructed Landscapes, served as a catalyst to produce new work that relies on the repurposing and reimagining of redundant source material, a process integral to her practice. Activated through recurring actions performed in the colour darkroom, it extends Talmor’s exploration of voids and negative spaces. Through multiple transitions and reproductions, colour photograms made with collaged book sheets of the monograph, render the original source material — and its connotations — invisible while retaining its indexical trace. By oscillating between negatives and positives Talmor seeks to playfully blur the often-rigid boundaries and reductive relationship imposed on traditional photographic practices. Through this process, a cycle of mechanical reproduction is instigated, eventually coming full circle.  Like all the work in the Constructed Landscapes series, analogue glitches and the materiality of the process come to the fore; traces of light leak out to form flares and so-called imperfections — a consequence of the hardware and optics of the darkroom—simultaneously enabling the artist’s hand to become more visible.