reviews > Normal, IL

Jessica Bingham
Jessica Bingham

Jessica Bingham makes constructed photographs. She drives around cities looking for abandoned lots and in them uses found materials plus some of her own to build temporary assemblages that she then shoots with a camera. The resulting images beam with the beauty of detritus, the pleasure of ephemerality, the joy of the chance encounter, the satisfaction of the minor aesthetic intervention. Looking at them sparks narratives: An old wooden beam covered in pink neon stamped a square-patterned scrap of rosy cardboard. (It didn’t really. It would take a giant to use a beam to make prints.) A radioactive sandstorm left a dusting of phosphorescent yellow in its wake. (Don’t worry, it’s just bright yellow sand.) Is Bingham a sculptor? Is she a photographer? She’s something in between, a maker of three-dimensional sculptures meant to be seen not in the round but as photographs, specifically framed and from a single perspective. What happens to her assemblages after she and her camera leave the scene is up to the city, not the artist or the museum.

—Lori Waxman 3/25/16 12:19 PM