Statement

C. Meier approaches making photographs with curiosity, playfulness, and experimentation. 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.

The polaroids in Meier’s series Pushed (2020) and Pulled (2021-ongoing) are made with intuitive actions, occasional additive elements, and inconsistent interactions with light. Creating a set of tactics learned from previous failures, Meier pairs a semi-controlled approach with improvisation and chance. Working sightlessly using a light-proof film developing bag, Meier gives up control of the outcomes by only using touch as a guide, a sense often undervalued in the making of a photograph.

Cameraless, the Polaroid film offers a canvas of immediacy and physicality, processed through a self-contained set of chemistry 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 take place to make the object cannot be reproduced. Like a painting, each image is unique. The final result is a fixed photographic object that recalls its own process of conception through materiality.