This month we feature work from our inventory by Michelle Kloehn. These dark and mysterious photographs on metal are the perfect representation of the moment in which we  currently live. In reviewing an exhibition of these works at Platform in 2014, Jen Graves wrote in The Stranger, “the photographs feel like fresh secrets in a foreign language. Kloehn's art raises the hairs on the neck.”

The artist said about this series of unique photographs “for me the power in photography lies in a middle ground between light and shadow, abstraction and representation, between what we think we see and what we want to see. In the studio, I alternate between making small sculptures and working with light itself. I shoot the sculptures using the Wet Plate Collodion method, a 19th century photographic technique that produces an instant image—a process similar to the immediacy of a 20th century Polaroid, though more primitive, physical and open to chance. I might start with a piece of paper, some tape, and a mirror and end with unique images of flying saucer-like shapes that both flatten and extend space. A mark can be both the edge of a mirror and a long billowy line of chemistry. I am exploring the limits of photography and its processes; the difference between taking and making, image and object.” 

Michelle Kloehn received her MFA from Bard College and her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She was the recipient of two MacDowell Colony Fellowships. Her work was included in Platform’s exhibition “Dark Entries” and in exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), and at galleries in New York and California.

Pictured above: Untitled  (0834), 2009, unique collodion photograph on metal plate,
16 x 20 x 1/16 inches, signed/dated on the back, $1,400