Charles Grogg
American, 1966-

Crema 12, 2013
inkjet print



Undated photo from http://www.charlesgrogg.com/about/

"I used an iPhone to make images of crema—the rich foam that forms on my morning espresso—in the summer morning light. These relatively uninteresting experiments in isolating the patterns in the foam as it dissipates became much more interesting in the process of making negatives of the images for platinum printing.

The immediate and physically simple transition from positive to negative colors rendered haunting possibilities—the universe unfolding like cells on a slide, or impossible planets brimming with the promise of sustainable life. In my art practice, I am most interested in the fundamental rejection of the apparent by photographs, in the idea that pictures hold their meaning in abeyance, the way the unconscious— to a trained and curious mind—is clearly visible in our actions but otherwise elusive. In this sense, even the apparent accidental arrival at meaning in the pictures seems destined, as if I had been after these images without understanding them.

Though I made slight adjustments to the digital images as I would have analog images in a darkroom, I left them almost entirely without affect. The blue in these images, for example, is the natural negative of the beige/brown color of the crema, though brown coffee has nothing to do with these pictures. They come instead from processes, not from things."

- Artist's Statement, http://www.charlesgrogg.com/crema/

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

These are images I made of Crema, the foam that forms on the top of my morning espresso. The prolific photographer Gary Winograd once said he took photographs to see what things would look like photographed. I suppose I was following suit. I wanted to capture the look of the rich, swirling foam before it dissipated too much, and making these images with my iPhone became a morning routine.

I had been printing photographs in platinum for the past two years, and I thought about printing these in platinum in order, as the thought went, to see what they would look like. Before I could get so far as that, I made a technical mistake which inverted the colors of the images on my computer screen. The immediate and simple transition from positive to negative colors - from the beige brown color of the coffee to the natural blue negative - rendered haunting possibilities. The universe unfolded in a jolt of recognition, an impossible planet brimmed with the promise of sustainable life.

I made this work because the world is right in front of us in ways we don't normally begin to imagine, and when we encounter what we don't expect and it resonates in us, we are taken, joined, moved together. These pictures of Crema, printed in their negative state, made me aware that something extraordinary had been hiding, waiting to be discovered.

- Colefax Gallery in conjunction with Heavenly Bodies, 2014