In an era of unprecedented data fluidity, our images, which can be transmitted by e-mail and shared with a simple click, travel through metal cables that run thousands of kilometers on the ocean floor to end up stored in datacenters, physical infrastructures. Whether they appear on print or our personal screens, our images also require materialization through a medium in order to be visible. It is this double reality that we forget when we speak of digital images, assuming that they remain suspended in the cloud or transiting through equally nebulous paths, and it is this paradox that Laura Rives is working on to render visible. Indeed, the artist produces photographs, or technical images generated by a visual recorder such as a scanner, which she uses in relationship to matter and spaces similare to those of sculpture.

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If an image is a representation, it cannot exist outside the support that makes it perceptible.

The artist also alters this support, whether she crumples vinyl paper in malléable (2014) and malachite azurite (2016), folds fabric in synarchipel (2017) or melts plexiglas with a blowtorch in abîme (2018). The artist chooses flat industrial materials, on which it is possible to print images, but which, once the transfer is completed, can be reworked to occupy the space. In this way, the image does not hybridize with a volume, in the sense that it is placed on top of a pre-existing sculpture. It is photography, by its already physical dimension, that becomes volume, and the material abandons its function as a support to become a form that breaks with the flatness of the images and inhabits the space. The folds of paper, fabric and plexiglass hinder the movement of the gaze over the surface of the image, which is no longer smooth; the attempt to read the photograph, and through it reality, is suspended.

In Laura Rives’ approach, the link to reality relaxes, twists, folds and retracts like the supports on which she prints her images. To this loss of the referent, however, responds an increase in the photographic medium through its three-dimensional deployment in space. The images that we generally think of as entities that have become impalpable are resolutely physical, but their fluidity persists in the flexibility of the fabrics and the waves of plexiglass formed under the effect of heat. By tensioning the properties of contemporary images in the digital age, the artist manifests the disarray they cause in our conception of photography, and more broadly of its role in our understanding of the world.