Amanda Marchand: The Arithmetics of Distance

Traywick Contemporary is pleased to announce an exhibition with Amanda Marchand featuring her acclaimed photography series, Re: Touch, the Arithmetics of Distance. In her fourth solo show with the gallery, Marchand takes an experimental approach to photography in exploring the natural world and our changing climate.

“Artistic experiments using antique photo retouching inks and old slide film
shimmer with serendipity and new meaning years after they were created and
stored away.” Lensculture, April 2024.

Several years ago, Marchand re-discovered some earlier works where she had applied ink on film and sent them to be scanned, curious to see them for the first time. She received the scans in mid-March 2020 just as the Covid-19 pandemic was quickly changing the world, and it became a timely studio project, given the ensuing limitations of lockdown. Her fascination with the series has been on what she describes as “the strange alchemy of creativity itself. How something you begin years prior, can sit patiently, like a seed, until the right moment.” Materials, process, and experimentation with the medium of photography are central to Marchand’s work. Time also serves as a pivotal theme in her larger practice as well as in this series, where photographs have the unique ability to transcend the present moment to reveal glimpses and echoes of the past. These photographs channel the malleability of time, offering a poignant commentary on our evolving connection with history.

Marchand elaborates on the creative process: “For this series, I used antique photo retouching inks and old slides from my personal photo archive. These inks are traditionally used to erase flaws that occur in analog photography—to create a ‘perfect’ print. By using a dropper, the inks interact serendipitously with the landscape, as stains, blotches, floating vessels, imaginary interventions, each suggesting different relationships to the land; political, environmental, formal, and corporeal.”

A native of Montreal, Amanda Marchand lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001, followed by a Graduate Fellowship Residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2002. Recent honors include, the 2024 LensCulture International Art Awards, 2023 “Julia Margaret Cameron Award” – honorable mention, The 2022 “Silver List” (Silver Eye Center for Photography and Carnegie Mellon); Medium Photo’s “Second Sight Award Winner,” 2021; Photo Lucida’s “Critical Mass Top 50,” 2021; the 2019 “International LensCulture Art Awards,” Winner; Klompching Gallery’s “FRESH 2019,” Honorable Mention. She has published several monographs with Datz Press, with a new book launching this summer. Her work is in the collection of The Getty Research Institute, Stanford University Library, San Jose Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Awarded more than a dozen residencies, Marchand is a MacDowell Colony, Hermitage Artist Retreat, Mass MoCA, and Headlands Center for the Arts Fellow.