Art that is meant for the body does not always translate well on the flat confines of 2D work. But what is so clever and interesting about Dark Room, a joint painting and photography show over at Pioneer Square gallery Koplin del Rio, is the use of tattoo ink to give dimension and depth to paintings. It feels fresh, inspiring, new.
Dark Room features the work of two Californian artists, tattoo and visual artist Shay Bredimus and photographer Sarah Elise Abramson. These two know each other; Bredimus has even painted Abramson in a previous show in the form of Medusa. For this exhibition, they riffed off each other’s seemingly disparate styles and approaches to color to create something cohesive.
Abramson’s photography is dreamy, seeming to come from an interrupted narrative. Like a film still, you feel like you are witnessing a story mid-moment, without the context of what comes before or after that frame in time. She cites David LaChapelle as an influence and mentor, having worked with him for a number of years, but her figures and gaze is less plasticky, less garish—there’s an organic, naturalistic quality that imbues the photographs. The nude women lying in the grass are not some Hollywood ingénue in her first Vogue spread, but me, you, or my best friend finding respite in the sun. Her colors are vivid against the palette of a gray PNW afternoon.
But where Abramson is lush, Bredimus is stark and two-tone. His black and white colors make me think of classical, marble spaces. His brush drawings of cloaked women remind me of Mary. Or something. Bredimus paints on architectural drafting paper which is similar to newspaper but is archival (meaning, it doesn’t yellow with age) and is very waxy. This is visible if you get up close to it. But the most attractive thing about his work is what he uses to paint, tattoo ink, and how black his blacks get.
Though seen as a simple, basic color, black can be finicky, encompassing a scale of color. Anyone who has tried to wear an all-black outfit is familiar with the stresses of wearing different blacks—the pants a more faded shade of black than the blue-black of your t-shirt. It can be frustrating.
Around the time that Bredimus was experimenting in his studio with different mediums, he was also working in a Polynesian tattoo shop where he learned to procure the deepest of blacks by cooking down the pigment into a consommé of ink, removing the water, and turning the liquid into a sludge of dark black.
The cooked blackness of the tattoo ink coupled with the waxiness of the paper makes the work look like it dripped into existence. Or maybe it’s more accurate to think of it in the context of a darkroom, where the chemicals bath helps create a photo that slowly forms, making itself known, seemingly appearing before you. Still, somehow, that image of darkroom-developing is coupled with an image of those aliens from Arrival squirting out their weird alien language for Amy Adams to dramatically and emotionally translate into English. Which is to say, one could get close to Bredimus’s paintings and feel like they could just tip right into them.
Dark Room is up until March 30th. See it in person before it goes away.
