Self/Portrait

Self/Portrait draws on the artist’s past work in writing, painting, and photography to further his investigation of systems of language, process, and meaning. The work reproduces, through a series of distortions, a massive painting from 2013, which in turn is a reinterpretation of his now-iconic 1966 Self/Portrait ink drawing on graph paper. The year 1966 was formative in Bochner’s practice, marking his first engagement with photography as well as his adoption of the thesaurus as an artistic tool. To create this version of Self/Portrait, Bochner relied on a complex sequence of photographic processes: beginning with a digital image file, a digital negative was created and enlarged. The artist then used wet collodion chemistry to approximate an ambrotype, which was bleached and reprocessed, resulting, finally, in a unique collodion silver positive on mirror backing. This elaborate process produces a fractured reflection of each viewer’s own image, which shimmers through the words as one gazes upon Bochner’s self-portrait.