Wendy Small

lives and works in New York City . She received a degree in painting from the School of Visual Arts, and a BSN from New York University. She was assistant to the painter Terry Winters for 10 years and since then has worked as the nurse at Grace Church School. In 2002 she began working exclusively with the photogram process. Her photograms have been shown in galleries throughout NY and the United States, most recently Morgan Lehman, Sears Peyton, and Von Lintel Gallery. She has enjoyed two summers at the Vermont Studio Center Residency and has participated in Aipad, Nada, Pulse and Paris Photo LA. art fairs.

Wendy Small has long considered the cyclical connections between analog and digital photography mediums, and the slippages that occur between these worlds. “New Math” represents a departure from the artist’s usual process of working, which was always invested in the material properties of print photography but adhered to a more conventional rectangular format. This new body of work was made as a way to play alongside what Small considers her usual projects.

During lockdown, Small found solace and relief in the simple act of cutting and collaging existing photogram prints and scraps, managing the primary shapes and stacking the forms into spirited constructions. These “New Math” collages soon took over the table in the artist’s living space in the way that a puzzle might sprawl over the floor of a family room, with additions and adjustments being made each day, an ongoing process. The works are geometric in form but organic in their somewhat loosely grid-based structures. Each piece incorporates a focused color palette usually dominated by one or two hues, with other chromatic inflections breaking up the all-over image, which is further disrupted by the white spaces of the negative areas that have been cut out. In standing before these works, the viewer enters into the subtle modulations and depth of the photographic images while enjoying the collage’s unmistakable physicality.

Across Small’s output over the years there has always been an emphasis on abstraction. Whether photographing the shadows of birds or domestic objects, or creating kaleidoscopic patterns out of the silhouettes of plant life, the artist relies on an almost romantic pictorial language of formal transformation and obfuscation. This latest body of work takes Small’s vernacular one step further into a sort of self-determined abstraction, where forms are created by cutting up and reorganizing the component parts of her darkroom materials.

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New Math - Night Walk - NY 30 x 26" Framed $4200

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