Graphite on paper under black glass
17 ¾ × 13 inches (45 × 33 centimeters)
2020–2021

In the graphite drawings of Christopher Squier, light wave patterns are rendered beneath black panes of glass to engage the visual material positioned both before and behind the viewer’s eye. The images, rendered by hand, are informed by the tension produced by light as it moves through the atmosphere.

Light’s refractions are caused by various interferences: they ripple sinuously and in aural streams carrying the power to tap into the body’s avisual capacities. Here, they pulsate in palpable rhythms by generating figurative and literal harmonics of light. The images vibrate at the thorny edges of optical perception because they move in the synchrony and discord attributed to light’s polarized extremes—glittering rays that blind eyes and burn through retinas, mysterious and gaping existential voids.

The drawings are executed in the style and visual patterning found in the photographs created by Berenice Abbott for Scientific Illustrated to document the theory of quantum waveforms. Abbott’s photographs were produced during the anti-Communist witch hunt of the 1950s; their opaque voids, motorized twitches, and ephemeral forms point at the secrecy and ‘sedition’ practiced by the State’s systematized disavowel or ‘occulting’ of certain persons, communities, and forms of knowledge.

Squier’s images bring to question the experience of sight, seeing, and vision respectively and collectively by working at a particular a/visual chasm. They activate the body’s aural registers to produce knowledge that might otherwise be disembodied and left unseen. In a world operating through the law of ‘seeing is believing,’ where modes of looking (at and away) make relations and persons (dis)appear, one must account for and call into critical question how ‘we’ see.

{Description courtesy of Jackie Valle, “How to catch a witch: seeing through obscurity,” February 2022}