Nick Marshall

8x10” unique gelatin silver lumen prints

Clouds lack specificity. They are timeless. They are placeless.

With a cell phone, I take photographs of clouds. I then invert the image to make a negative and place the phone upside-down on a sheet of light sensitive paper, exposing it to the illuminated phone screen for several hours. The resulting photographs are an homage to Alfred Stieglitz’s cloud photographs from his seminal work Equivalents. While Stieglitz’s photographs marked a break with the past, Screen/Time references the material history of the medium, creating photographs that push back against time. The warm sepia tones recall 19th century albumen prints; the visible fissures transferred from the cracked phone screen recall glass plate negatives; and the outline of the phone screen recalls the historical practice of contact printing.

Though many of these characteristics are reminders of the past, the aspect ratio of the phone and the repetition of its shattered screen are also reminders of the digital present; a moment where we are more consumed with images than ever before and photographs feel less fixed in time, like clouds.

Altered chromogenic prints, 4x6” ea.

Multi-channel video installation done in collaboration with Cory Fitzgerald.

Escapes is a series of photographs and paintings that explore the desire to withdraw from the everyday into representations of nature. With the sea as a backdrop, the work creates anonymous or imaginative geographies from our attempts to define color — in particular, of air and water, two ephemeral elements. 

The photographs in this series center around found snapshots of families vacationing at sea. These tactile images are cast as objects of nostalgia floating in chromatic pools sampled via the eyedropper tool. Our ability to recall color is complicated by the chromogenic prints instability as hues shift over time.

The language used to market consumer house paints is a catalyst for the multi-panel compositions of the eggshell finish paintings. With titles such as, Crisp Morning Air 780 over Caribbean Blue Water 2055-30, the paintings conjure up idyllic vistas with no specificity, while Utah Sky 2065-40 over Clearest Ocean Blue 2064-40 form an impossible horizon.

Digital chromogenic print, dimensions vary