This review was written in response to the exhibition "Roundels: Open Source" at Guild Gallery II, New York, NY, November 21, 2024 - January 22, 2025

Insubordinate Cells: Heather Cox’s photo alchemy

By Olivia Rodrigues

Between 1980 and 1987, the number of photo mini-labs in the U.S. ballooned from 600 to just under 15,000.[1] Companies like Copal Systems and the Eastman Kodak Company had compressed and advanced their film and photo-processing machines, thereby inaugurating millions of people into 24/7 access to 1-hour photo printing. Americans had a ferocious appetite to expedite their memories into solid form and in the flash of a few decades, there was a mass impulse to print images, often doubles or triples. Just as quickly as these machines proliferated, their obsolescence arrived. Suddenly, prints became clutter or nostalgia or just plain stuff. To this day, their preciousness remains unclear; nostalgic, junkspace, physical, cheap, or relic-like, the images can run the gamut within one envelope of photographs.

All too familiar with this hodgepodge of value is Heather Cox (b.1966), whose latest exhibition at Guild Gallery II takes up the 1-hour photo as her medium. “Roundels: Open Source” makes use of only a few materials throughout the entire gallery: some chicken wire, staples, and reams of 4x6” C-prints. Reconstituted into circles, strips, and nets, the sculptures take on an organic form–one steeped in their own ephemerality–to alchemize a public memory through physical media.

Trained as a photographer and bookmaker, Cox’s practice spans sculpture, installation, photography and collage. She stages investigations of the edible, the cellular, the hidden and the forgotten. “Anything you’d find in a junk drawer, that’s what I’m working with,” she confesses. Indeed, the nucleus of “Roundels”–the photographs–have been amassed through other people’s forgotten collections. From there, her task is one of reinvention. Physically fragmenting these images becomes a way to process and contextualize them; it also disintegrates foreground from background and accentuates the formal quality of the glossy photo emulsion. Box Turtle (all works 2024), showcases this meditative process in its clearest form: photo circles are stacked in three concentric circles and stapled across a chicken wire shell. Some photos have been misprocessed, leaving a distinct magenta tint. Others crop a subject with a merciless refusal of its importance. For Cox, these images are all created equal in their ontological fact of their medium. Though divorced from context or owner, a visual map manifests across the carapace: some photos bear their origin with the distinct presence of a palm tree or the grain of the film, or a glimpse of a thin white border. They are at once anonymous in their subject matter, acquainted in relation across the turtle’s shell, and familial as fragments from an heirloom photo album. There is a constant pull between the wear of this artwork, its composition across images, and its medium-based structure.

This sort of interdependency continues with Wallpaper, a wall-sized installation which anchors the space and backgrounds the work physically and materially. The gestalt is a white polka dot wallpaper pattern. On a closer approach, you can retrace Cox’s method: she’s taken the inverse of each photo’s roundel and woven a net to adorn the wall against other works that are hung atop it. Over its span of the entire wall, corners of C-prints adjoin one another by means of a staple with both a befuddling seamlessness and jarring jump cut. As with the Box Turtle sculpture, any figures in the margins of the central hole punch are treated purely as a formal element: they are oriented upside down, sideways, by whatever means lends the finest enmeshment with other images. The moment of touch is gone between an older man and a baby, the head of a dinner party guest is punched out, a portrait’s subject is sliced down the middle. At times, the violence of these extractions reworks impulses from the Pictures generation, but it supplants the high-stakes of representation politics with collective memories held in material specificity.

The punctum that is held across these prints compels Cox. In many ways, her exploration of other people’s images stems from Barthes’ sentiment that “as Spectator…Photography [is interesting] for only sentimental reasons... to explore it not as a question but as a wound.” [2] How can we understand photography in its fragmented form as it moves from seeing to feeling with such an uncanny clip?

Cox raises this question in every work discreetly as well as a united corpus. The punches and cuts read like cells of an organism that stretch throughout the gallery, in which each work is its own organ. Cox’s interest in the insubordinate cell arises here, particularly as she is currently sorting through the history of the revolutionary science which re-contextualized disease into systems of cellular mis-behavior. In Big Slide rondels multiply like troublesome dominos, crowding together into an ill-content mass. Perhaps the best illustration is Rumpelstiltskin, where Cox amalgamates her many methods of reconstituting these fragments of photographs. The rondels slither around in close succession like in Big Slide, masses bloat out in a rhythmic construction similar to Box Turtle, as well as many others from across the gallery, including one which mimics a kind of sculptural chain link slouching towards the bottom of its pedestal. Rather than impress any sort of abjection, Rumpelstiltskin boasts Cox’s knack for play. The organism’s restlessness for life betrays our own sort of fervor to document, preserve, and carry forward our memories in the photos that make it up. The photograph outpaces the wound here–it’s a vivacious anima.

The being of Cox’s gallery self-preserves through risky behavior. Cox nestles photo flourishes in the sills of the gallery’s street level windows. Made from the scraps of other works, Cox folds photo strips in a teardrop shape, image side in, and combines them into interlocking leaves stacked atop another to create an elaborate screen. Martyr-like, they bare themselves to the harsh light of the sun. As the conservation coordinator for the Whitney Museum of American Art for over twenty years, Cox is all too aware of the stakes of this kind of intervention. The sun rapidly fades the C-prints, but that kind of sacrifice is beautiful to Cox. Their exposure creates an armature for the rest of the gallery–a space Cox describes as a “jewel box”. This kind of interdependent care constitutes Cox as a person and artist. Many visitors came to the Guild Gallery II through its adjacency to the Hudson Guild Older Adult Center; as the lunch crowd departed, they found themselves equally enamoured by the work as with the artist herself. It compelled them to share stories, recount a quilt pattern, or donate their own photographs to be used in future projects. Memories resurfaced, and they hungered to be shared. It’s a stark contrast from Cox’s pursuit in conservation, which requires the stewardship of a collection, often to exacting standards, for future generations.

On a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cox fawned over an album of photos of New York by Berenice Abbott. The prints from 1929 are evidently precious–the museum displays each album page with a careful orchestration of acid-free materials and limited light levels. It is rarely shown, often making up the 96% of the Met’s collection which is not on view. At Cox’s exhibition, exposure abounds. The gallery avails itself for the sake of facilitating wonder, conversation, and small moments of mutual discovery. The preciousness doesn’t exist in the art object per se, but in its conjuring of the past for its viewers. Cox delights in the life force of her work hitting full potential before its eventual fading from the light. As Abbott herself said when she began her photo practice in 1929, “Old New York is fast disappearing;” [3] the young photographer set it upon herself to capture the changing urban landscape on film for those who would soon not recognize those very streets she walked.

In “Roundels”, the guests of the Hudson Guild Older Adult Center, the artist, and visitors alike, all bear witness to a city beholden to non-stop and accelerating transmogrification. For Cox, the remedy rests in a kind of radical exposure of herself and the memory of others to the public for the sake of the now. In today’s New York, a far cry from the land of 15,000 photo mini-labs, physical media’s true preciousness rests in its ability to associate ourselves with others present.

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[1] “TimesMachine: Saturday February 6, 1988 - NYTimes.Com.” The New York Times. TimesMachine, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1988/02/06/issue.html. Accessed 29 Dec. 2024.

[2] Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Pbk. ed, Hill and Wang, 2010, 21.

[3] Abbott, Berenice, “Changing New York” (project proposal, New-York Historical Society, 1932); excerpted in O'Neal, Hank. Berenice Abbott: American Photographer. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982): 16–17.

Olivia Rodrigues is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a Masters in Curatorial Studies from Bard College and centers her research around interdisciplinary artworks that touch on performance, labor, and joke-making.