Haptics (2024 - ongoing)

C. Meier’s works—chromatic abstractions mounted and presented on vibrant sheets of neon plexiglass—are experiments with form and process. Inspired by the concept of Concrete Photography, a sub-genre of Concrete Art, Meier’s work aims to embody the truest form of photography by radically dismantling the traditional viewpoints of how time, photo-sensitive material, and representation function in photography. For concrete photographs, the photographic object is the only thing that is real. Meier’s photographs are not of something, they are something.

Pure geometry and color are manifested using techniques akin to a photogram – hand cut stencils dodge and burn various exposures of colored light onto Polaroid film. Each image is conceptualized first as a drawing to plan exposure sequencing. Meier then pairs a semi-controlled approach with improvisation and chance. Working completely sightless, they give up control of the outcomes by only using touch as a guide, a sense often undervalued in the making of a photograph.

Camera-less, the Polaroid film offers a canvas of immediacy and physicality, processed through a self-contained set of chemistry manually spread across the film. The interaction between the artist’s hand, light sensitive material, and chemistry ignites a visual play of color and form. By embracing the unpredictability of these processes the work can never be replicated and the specific physical actions that took place cannot be reproduced. Like a painting, each image is unique. Standalone and paired Polaroids are mounted to glowing plexiglass as a reference to the light used in the work’s exposure. The final result is a fixed photographic object that recalls its own process of conception through materiality.