Miranda Lichtenstein: Recorder

For nearly two decades, Lichtenstein has worked in varied subgenres within photography’s historical archetypes: marginalized contemporary landscapes, refracted still life, performance-based portraiture and process-oriented abstraction. In Recorder, Lichtenstein embarks on an ambitious three-part series of images that recycle and reorient themselves within the limits of technology and photographic vision.

Every image in Lichtenstein’s layered artist book departs from a singular work: Welcome Water, where Lichtenstein collaborated with J. Stoner Blackwell to make flatbed scans of the artist’s delicate sculptures derived from disposable carrier bags, which were then cut out and stitched into a sprawling sculptural floorpiece.

Recorder contains profound depths and coalescent shapes that never fully resolve themselves, but within this profundity a clear thread can be drawn, connecting the push-and-pull of photography’s tendency to both record and obscure, with a meditation on waste, consumption, and the environmental changes set loose by the anthropocene.