WASHINGTON, DC.- von ammon is presenting the inaugural show in its new location at 3210 Grace Street in Georgetown, a solo of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Eloise Hess. We are honored to debut the space with Hess’ first major solo exhibition in the United States.

Early Morning Tomorrow is a sequence of twenty-seven small paintings: approximately five by eight inches, the common scale of the erstwhile tradition of one-hour photo processing.The number of paintings represents the number of photographs on a disposable camera.

The content of the paintings is the colloquial stuff of a family home and its environs: sun-warmed window panes, mountain-lined lakes, the television, the pool, the playground, the dog. Surrounding each of these scenes is a bleary vignette of darkness, as if each resides at the end of a tunnel. This shadowy frame, we will find, is the emotional locus of the series.

Over the course of a week in July 2024, Eloise and her father, Charles, took nearly three-hundred photographs, on nine disposable cameras, from which the artist arranged this narrative of twenty-seven. Charles is living with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease and the two have been shooting together for about two years. When he had trouble finding the button on the camera, they found a workaround: to take a photograph, Charles held his camera in the position from whence he framed a picture while Eloise aligned her camera's lens with his viewfinder and shot through it. The frame in each photograph, flush or askew, is the space between the two cameras, the tunnel inside the viewfinder.

The apparatus fractures the authorship of the picture and beckons interpretation of the nature of the parent-child dyad, modulated between many modes, from care, to tension, to rebellion. If a photograph is a transmission of the photographer’s eye to the viewers’, what then, when two authors are needed to merely point and shoot, when one is also the viewer of the other? The series points to the potential and limit of this transmission, momentarily suspended in the tensile gulf between authors, in this highly intimate act of taking a picture together.

The artist’s subsequent rendering of the photographs into paintings imbue these quotidian scenes with a fourth dimension of visual, cognitive and emotional space. So as the lens is doubled, the surface is bifurcated. Two prints, an inkjet print and a silkscreen print, are merged through the layering of cloudily diaphanous encaustic. The surface of a painting is, by its layered composition, one of struggle made manifest, wherein the misregistration of the marks generates aleatoric color fields that resemble the spectral afterimages projected onto closed eyelids. These retinal fields of color emerge as if through the aforementioned tunnel. As a drug store print, this surrounding space would be a featureless void; here, rendered with painterly depth, it serves as the unifying probity of the series, both visually and conceptually.

Eloise Hess (b. 1995, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles.