Eileen Quinlan

The parade of mysterious photographic works on view in Eileen Quinlan’s new show fills both of this gallery’s Lower East Side spaces, but also leaves them feeling strangely empty. The pieces are large but not grand, spaced farther apart than what’s customary, and, altogether, have an unmooring effect. The potential significance or emotional resonance of any individual image—there’s a regal fox, brambly woods, shattered glass, a sexty crotch shot, and many abstractions—is undercut by its puzzling, seemingly random (but clearly calculated) relationship to the others. In the unsettling search for Quinlan’s subject matter among these quasi-placeholders, one guesses there’s some stock photography in the mix—indeed, the press release confirms it. The shattered glass in Paris Shot, 2016, for example, is an image of a restaurant window damaged in November’s terrorist attacks that the artist licensed from an agency and rephotographed. She adds her touch during the developing process with a chemical drip, cleaving the spider-webbed form in half.

This is one of many such spattered, flecked, or dripped-on black-and-white prints, left unframed, pinned to the wall like work for an art-school crit. As Quinlan puts contemporary photography—high, low, amateur, user-generated, corporate-controlled—through its paces, she employs the happy accidents of the increasingly unused darkroom. In contrast, the bigger color prints on view, mounted on Dibond and in metal frames, are portraits of the process of digitization itself: streaky nonpatterns made by sliding a mirror across a flatbed scanner at work. While their artifactual, glitchy qualities feel familiar, they’re not friendly objects. Quinlan’s tough formalism denies us most of what we want from photos, but, in upending rote reactions, she helps us parse the deluge.