SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Dolby Chadwick Gallery presents Glass + Light, an exhibition of ground-breaking images by Amanda Means. This is the gallery’s first show with the artist renowned for extending the limits of the photographic medium. Means reanimates common objects by reinventing their method of capture and rendering extraordinary portraits that restore a sense of wonder in the beauty of the everyday.

Abstraction is a powerful aspect of her work: she captures pure form, line, and space with lyrical intensity to a degree that shape itself could almost be the subject matter of her work. Yet, focusing on that aspect alone would deny the expansive insights intensified by her choice of subjects. Two series of common objects – water glasses and lightbulbs – are the stars of Glass + Light.

Means created a new technique of capturing “direct print” images. It’s a sort of camera obscura in reverse. The artist converted a 19th-century horizontal wooden camera into a darkroom enlarger. She places her object directly inside the head of this enlarger so that its lamp projects light through the water glass then through the lens and onto photo paper on the wall. This reveals intense dimensional detail. As Means explains: “Since the light passes through the water glass rather than being reflected off its surface, we see much more of the dynamism and drama occurring within the translucent glass vessel than would otherwise be the case with a traditional camera.” As these camera-less images have no film negative, The object becomes the negative.

Means’ divination of the inner alchemy of light within the everyday object continues in the Light Bulb Series. In these “glass flower” portraits, the artist turns from the silky subtlety of black & white to the exuberance of color. Now with two sources of light – the lightbulb and the lamp she places behind it – Means can adjust even further. She can dim the bulb’s incandescence, employ different exposure times to coax blurriness from the bulb’s filament, and explore novel combinations of color gel filters. Means stacks the filters, as a watercolorist would combine a medley of hues, to achieve fresh color combinations. The color filters may be placed between the camera and the bulb or behind the bulb.

Stand before the images that Means presents to us. Which of these Light or Glass feels most like your self-portrait at this moment? Be open to what arises. In finding for herself a liberation from the strictures of traditional photography and the pristine printing techniques she had mastered, Means works like a jazz musician, achieving a fluidity and effervescence that opens thrilling uncharted fields in which to play.

Amanda Means is a graduate of Cornell University and SUNY Buffalo. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her contributions to contemporary photography in 2017. Means has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, and her work is included in numerous collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the MIT List Visual Arts Center; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.; and the Nicola Erni Collection, Switzerland. The artist lives and works in Beacon, New York.