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"In my work, paired images on antique stereographs become a framework for miniature paintings that play with doubling, erasure and time.
Stereographs date back to the 19th century, when they were a popular form of home entertainment. The stereoscope—a handheld viewfinder resembling wooden binoculars —leveraged the newly discovered phenomenon of binocular vision to create an illusion of three-dimensionality. At three inches tall and seven inches wide, stereograph cards are shaped like elongated postcards, and each one bears two near-identical copies of an image.When observed through the viewfinder, the paired images on a card converge to give the appearance of depth.
I love that many stereographs are captioned with text, and the tension I can create by covering over the original image with my own while leaving the caption visible. The cards in Ready for the Ceremony were printed in 1905, and come from an incomplete set of stereographs showing “The 25 Stages From Courtship to Marriage” of a Victorian-era couple.
I think about how one form of image-making can exist like a barnacle upon or within another form, and how paintings can be like interlopers in other technologies. Though the captions on each piece in this series are about a couple approaching their wedding day, I wasn’t thinking much about romantic marriage when making the work; rather, I was thinking about how to reconcile or join together two different, seemingly incompatible views of the world.
Painting the remains of a device that came from an earlier era of rapid technological transformation allows me to think about our current technological moment, which strips people of their attention and erodes faith in what they see. It becomes almost essential to reflexively blunt the keenness of our observational powers to withstand the constant torrent of information shaping the media environment. I’m driven to make art by a sense that we don’t need to surrender to this tide and can remain rooted in a material present.
Though it is easy enough to paint a functional stereograph that looks three-dimensional within the stereoscope’s viewfinder, it is important to me that my paintings interrupt the original illusion. The small abstractions I paint gum up the works, replacing the three-dimensionality of the stereoscope with painted imagery that remains stubbornly what it is. The structure of the card invites the desire to look through or into a space, but the painting on top frustrates this desire, asking viewers to remain where they are and to reflect on the act of looking itself."
—Sally Scopa
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