Eloise Hess: Second hand

The photographs are taken on a disposable camera. The ease of the single-use, point and shoot facilitates the promise of photography: an instantaneous mastery of space and time in the making of a record, on sight, of light writing itself into memory. An instrument of capture, the camera is a dark room for this precise aim of seizing the present as it passes, a seeing that can be held and seen again.

But it is a painting that holds the photograph—or photographs, twelve selected from nearly five hundred—of the missed aim to make a picture out of what is seen. The artist Eloise Hess (b. 1995) collaborated with her father Charles Hess (b. 1961) to register the slow-motion atrophying of the linkages between the hand, mind, and eye; the lapses, an accumulating discontinuity, between his actions and his intention. One gesture replaces, or imperceptibly iterates, the other; one way of seeing, through one medium, falters, while attended to, in another medium, by a different way. In the lag, the image forms.