This body of work represents an ongoing investigation of art history and process beginning in 2018 by photo-based artists John Shimon and Lauren Semivan. The six to seven and a half foot high photograms were created as bodies lay on hand-sensitized archival paper, which is exposed by the sun in an outdoor setting. The resulting cyanotype prints are washed with a garden hose in an oversized wooden tray beneath a tree, and hung up to dry. Often the prints are toned and bleached using a combination of strong black tea and washing soda.  This primitive art making process, in dialogue with the landscape of a small northeast Wisconsin farm, allows for a graceful embrace of the organic and unknown. 

Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil’s Blueprints, created between 1949 and 1951, Tangency stretches across time, space, and worldly dimensions. Visual associations are made to early cave paintings, the 19th century botanical photograms of Anna Atkins, Yves Klein's Anthropometries, Bruce Conner's Angels, the Shroud of Turin, and architectural blueprints. The imprint of the human form on the paper is ghostly and translucent, with the process often generating curious bursts of light within the figures.  

Meanwhile, pinhole photographs made simultaneous to the photograms act as artifacts of their creation, showing the gestures from an entirely different perspective. Exposures are often made at ground level where the flat plane of the plywood becomes a line, further abstracting the forms and rendering the figures monumental. Light passes through a tiny hole in the camera for between 10 and 90 seconds as these images are recorded without mediation of a lens. The long exposure reveals an aggregate of time as light passes through the pinhole. 

As a result of this long duration of exposure, the images have an unreal, ethereal quality. Clouds move through the sky as insects travel across the ground. Sunlight often shifts dramatically. The pinhole generates an image quite unlike what is seen by the human eye; slowly accumulated on film or on a glass plate inside the camera. Chance events countered by intent create a precarious, farm-y laboratory; one that embraces what the natural environment may lend to the process. 

The point of Tangency: the point at which the line intersects the circle, and the flatness of the paper as it intersects organic form. This body of work represents a physical immersion in the process of making art; entering into a dialog with time, space, and human experience; art as a philosophy of life situated somewhere on a continuum of ideas and people. Within each photogram, the body is rendered simply and objectively, yet it manifests inherent contradictions.  It is fragile, concrete, vulnerable, embarrassing, sensuous, perfect, ugly, repellent, outrageous, universal, mysterious, known. Traces of physical presence with and without intent; trace as monument.