By Barbara Cuerden / Artist photos by Angelina McCormick

In nature, the bloom is evidence of a transformative moment before going to seed, often quickly followed by decay. Haunted by Karina Kraenzle’s Bloom images (on exhibit at Ottawa’s Cube gallery until April 1), I observed at the end of a recent visit with her a creepy perhaps Victorian Gothic quality to some of her work. She surprised me by quoting Giacometti when reflecting how in her best work she somehow connects with the dead:

The best I can say is that I think that I focus on death quite a bit in my work or maybe with just the temporariness of our existence, and the quote is “I aim to please the dead"...

In this latest series of digital images created meticulously via scanner, Kraenzle offers tangible evidence of an underworld of spirits. The artist loosens the stays and corsets, making you aware of your own breath on the other side of the glass.

Assembling surface topographies of ephemera, Kraenzle winds and then unwinds her subject matter. “Binding is what I started out with, but not what I ended up with,” she says of the work. What’s pictured are loosely bound bits of ‘nothing’—dryer fluff, string, cotton or wax paper—they take on shapes that mimic your surprised breath as it issues into the winter air. Or perhaps like breath on a mirror, you think, these works are still breathing inside their dark containers.

Kraenzle’s works maintain an exquisite tension contained within the space between the scanner’s glass surface and the back of the frame. The photographic and printing processes trace exchanges between what I want to call positive and negative transpirations. Between what is tangible and intangible, a ghostly imprint breathes between surfaces.

In conversation however, Kraenzle corrects my use of ‘negative’ and ‘positive’:

There’s no negative in digital photography. There really is only a positive. The technology is different … [in analog photography] light is turned through chemistry into an image ... The scanner is a lens-less technology ... With a scanner, you have that little chip and it’s moving across the back of the glass, back and forth alongside the light. The difference in resolution is enormous. It doesn’t have to gather up all that light, it’s literally one to one ... it’s actually recording, graphing, through light. It can go directly on every spot on that image ... if you set it at 1600 dpi it’s going to go really slowly. It’s collecting more information per pixel, if you want to say that, dot-to-dot, and then every bit of that light, from every single point, is being graphed. It turns what it sees into a number.

Imaging techniques aside, Kraenzle talks about the "ephemera" of the materials she uses as subject matter. “It’s flimsy stuff that doesn’t last ... in the end it goes in the garbage.”

Exhaled from nothing in particular, the ‘referent’ goes missing while its image lives another life. The artist refers to a “weird pixellated shifting” that can take place during the scanning process, which is heightened by any moving shadows that you might reflect back onto your side of the glass frames. Encased under glass, the ephemera appear to float as light as air.

Though her whitish apparitions may appear vaguely organic, Kraenzle has additional reasons for calling the show Bloom:

There’s that anticipation of that image coming out on the film, or on the contact sheet, or in the developing trays, and in a way it’s kind of hard to say what it’s going to look like. … And sometimes it looks, well, really different that what I thought, and from how I pictured ... Once I get a registration of that image and I make a slight change, a tweak, it can be shockingly different, or surprising ... the image seems to ‘bloom’ organically. It’s the closest I’ve been to the darkroom experience … there’s no chemistry, no safe light, no chemicals or pans, but there’s little echoes … When I write about Bloom, I’ve talked about a specimen-like quality, this ephemeral quality ‘pinned-down’ … they read as very organic. It’s a little bit like the butterfly specimen or plant stuff [in the specimen box] that adds to that aspect. I mean there’s no actual pinned down stuff.

When Kraenzle talks about moments of anticipation or of the ‘aaah’ or ‘aha‘ or of “drawing out the revelatory instant,” she unconsciously refers to the physical inhalation and exhalation of breath, or the tension in a breath suspended between unexpected events. Like the draft in a room, a puff of air can blur the edges of her materials. The breath of air that shifts things can indicate a spectral contact with what was once ‘there’.

The artist reflects on ideas from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1981 translation):

You see this is what Barthes talks about, “the thing that is, the thing that was, the thing that has ceased to be”—as soon as it’s recorded it’s done, right? I mean that’s the point, a lot of the point of the book—if the moment’s been recorded, it’s also gone ... The ‘punctum’ of a photograph can be the ‘AHA’ ... Whereas a painter builds up to the image, in photography that moment when a photographic image is registered, you’re bringing all your energies into preparing for that instant and in that instant it’s either there, or it’s not, or, whatever’s there is there … It’s not predictable.

Of course whether or not the punctum is ‘there’ is a very delicate thing. The lightness of Kraenzle’s materials is subject to a puff of air or the movement of a breath:

If it’s very still, it’s not a problem. But if the wax paper shifts in the moment that it is being made, it could actually register a blur, or the bottom of that image may have shifted, and actually be registered as a blur, but not be a blur because that’s only possible in analog photography. In digital there’s just a weird kind of pixellated shifting of the image, so it registers differently.

To create images in Bloom, Kraenzle first sees the possibilities in an assemblage of bits, turns them over in her mind, and then literally turns them over onto the surface glass of the scanner. While she physically stands behind what she thinks she sees, the scanner light sweeps slowly underneath the perspective that she can’t see. Later, she reverses the image to have it printed mechanically in ink on the underside surface of another glass panel. This panel is finally flipped, ‘re-turned’ back in place and held in the frame, while a white panel behind it serves to fill in ‘negative’ spaces. The artist explains how the inky blackness in which the final images appear to float is literally created by printer inks:

It’s an illusion that’s created by—again because it’s been scanned, because of the depth of field of the scanner—the high resolution of the scanner. And if you combine the fact that it hasn’t got a lot of depth but it has enormous resolution, and because I work in a dark[ened] room, and because I’m working with the very almost translucent material - the wax paper for instance is obviously translucent and you can look into the cotton balls a bit … It’s a combination of all these things that make that illusion.

The simplicity of the materials she uses, along with her plain description of the effects of the process, belie the real complexity of Kraenzle’s subject matter. During the refined choreographies underlying the work, Kraenzle literally has to hold her own breath at times in order to let the images ‘speak’.

In the end, the viewer stands between all of these processes, mirroring them in a funny way while examining the work. According to the science of optics, any image in front of us passes through the lens of the eye and is transcribed inverted on the back of the retina where the brain restores it the ‘right way up’. With Bloom, Kraenzle mimics this process through numerous inversions and reversals before the final image seems to lift itself off the surface. Trying to figure out how it all works, I hold my breath and become aware of the strange spaces that I contain. The artist seems to feel the same way:

In retrospect, who knows why that [quote from Giacometti] resonated with me so much? ... well, because several times in the studio when I was working on something, I just felt like I was in contact with something. I think again I go back to the Barthes ... in the studio and in the chemical baths and watching the images coming … I mean you feel like you are uncovering a spirit, you are in contact with what was there. It really does feel that way ... I don’t know ... But that is where the photographic got into my skin.

Barbara Cuerden is an Ottawa-based visual artist and commentator. For more on Karina Kraenzle, visit her website.

Angelina McCormick is an Ottawa-based photographer and educator.