The Analog Hole (or “Abundance”) is a new installation for RIGHT WINDOW Gallery by Chicago-based artist John Neff. The term “analog hole” refers to the difficulty of controlling rights to non-interactive digital media during playback. Coined by the Motion Picture Association of America, “analog hole” was quickly corrupted by the vernacular into “a-hole”. Neff’s recent digital-to-analog photographic process involves shooting digital images, creating hand-collaged acetate internegatives from those images, and printing his negatives as cyanotype photographs (or blueprints.)  At RIGHT WINDOW gallery, the artist’s elaborate print-making process embodies the rich possibility offered by the analog hole. 

Neff was one of three artists commissioned to create special projects for Photo Miami this year. His project, Father, can't you see I'm burning mixed images of nude male bathers with pieces based on his ongoing series depicting a nautical history of the United States. Exploring transparency and opacity, the bather images, large-format cyanotype prints, were presented on the specially constructed transparent exterior wall of his exhibition booth. The nautical subject – a monitor-bound digital image based on U.S. military photos of the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and a collection of cyanotype reproductions of news clippings about that incident – were shown in the booth's dim interior, a space that was furnished to resemble a makeshift workspace. The project's title, Father, can't you see I'm burning?, was drawn from a Slavoj Zizek text that discusses the relationship between external violence and internal traumas in psychoanalysis, by way of a Freudian dream. 

At RIGHT WINDOW Gallery, Neff will apply acetate negatives to the space’s front windows, transforming their panes into interpenetrated representations of an enlarged computer desktop and a small business storefront. Inside the gallery, prints made onto a variety of found fabrics will hang from lines stretched across the space. (Cyanotype prints are, in fact, developed in a water wash). Sorting, washing, folding, and hanging images out to dry, Neff will transform RIGHT WINDOW Gallery into a laundromat of sorts. As with his recent series, Bathers and Other Liquid Pictures (2007), Neff’s new project foregrounds watery studies of nude figures to suggest a return to the primacy of subjectivity in the visual arts.