Gabrielle Moser, “Lenscraft: Jessica Eaton Asks Us to Think About What We See,” “Canadian Art” (Winter 2013)
In 2010, Eaton began developing what was to become a signature visual technique. Photographing painted grayscale cubes and prisms through red, green, and blue lens filters—primaries on the additive color wheel—she uses multiple exposures to generate layered chromatic effects directly onto her negatives. Easily mistaken for digitally manipulated images, her works appear to defy the logic of analogue photography, but are in fact the products of countless hours of painstaking experimentation in the studio. Created in 2009, “Spatial Relation 27” slightly prefigures the full expression of her current idiom, offering viewers an intriguing glimpse at the artist’s development. Already recognizable here is Eaton’s facility at achieving a pleasing compositional balance through additive colours and neatly delineated geometric space—two features that would come to characterize her best known works.
