Opening: Jeremiah Teutsch: Cartesian Ghosts

Jeremiah Teutsch: Cartesian Ghosts
April 12 – May 10 @ kind of a small array
106 N Main, Magdalena, NM
Opening Saturday, April 12, 6 to 8 pm.

Jeremiah Teutsch has long been fascinated by early sculptural processes. His project at kind of a small array, Cartesian Ghosts, takes inspiration from a variety of sources, most prominently François Willème’s 1860s photo-sculpture technique, which employed a radial chamber with twenty-four cameras that captured multiple perspectives of a subject. Teutsch has devised an analog scanner that rotates around the subject, capturing twenty-four images—one every 15 degrees—using a single cellphone.

From these images, silhouettes are extracted and transferred onto archival blue cardboard using a process that manually imitates a pantograph, preserving accuracy through that process. Each cutout is then carefully assembled in a radial array, mirroring the original photographic sequence, to create a bust.

This process analogously follows the artists’ exploration of “scanning” through historical techniques. Somewhat in the general tradition of film maker Guy Maddin, or more specifically, finding inspiration in Walton Ford’s painting The Orientalist, which depicts a monkey using a device to trace a skull, Teutsch is drawn to the idea of repurposing antiquated methods to replicate processes that modern technology has fully automated. In essence, he becomes the machine.

His fascination with modeling the human head has evolved from political caricatures created for print media to mold-making, culminating in a wax self-portrait ceremoniously laid to rest in a 2012 funereal performance, and further into technical experimentation, working with diverse tools and materials—lasers, sophisticated lenses, pantographic linkages, and yes, foamcore. Teutsch’s tinkering and fabrication has become the true object of his pursuit, as he continues to investigate the intersections of sculpture, technology, and historical imaging techniques, pushing the boundaries between representation, process, and material exploration.