C.A. Greenlee
Nashville, Tennessee · Artist Photographer
About
Preoccupied with the natural world, photographic processes, and the archiving of ephemera. Drawn to what is at the threshold. To the evidence of lives lived and disappearing techniques. To the understanding that engaging with delicate materials, no matter how intentional, risks destruction. But to leave them alone entirely is to lose them even faster. The work asks you to be alive to the simultaneity of when.
RELIQUARIES
In the darkroom, a proof is made by placing negatives directly on light-sensitive paper. Primarily used for identification purposes, proof sheets are true to size and have raw edges with the deepest the paper can produce surrounding them. Glass slides previously sealed in their silver envelopes reveal tomb-like cathedrals and beauty in communion with danger disguised as innocence. Photograms work similarly, except the form itself becomes the negative. And instead of historical narratives that shift through the millenniums, these three-dimensional forms have physical fluidity. Light moves through, around, and beneath what lies on the paper, giving the prints an inherent aura. They become reliquaries. Together this series is an archaeological index of inverted histories and the result of digging for something holy. An archive made while traversing the underbelly of southern gothic Tennessee. A testament to transformation that could only happen in darkness and mud. The realization that perfection is a death process.
Deities
The hive's survival is tied to the success of the honey bee's ability to communicate through dance. Detailed directions are encoded in circular patterns, allowing them to beeline towards the catalyst of the world's earliest form of sweetness. And while perception may alternate between the taboo and the sacred, both bee and dancer maintain the divine ability to transform labor into honey and movement into spells.
Beelining Camera
The bee box is divided into two compartments, with windows that open and close. When I realized the box had to be light-proof, the parallel with pinhole cameras became clear: handheld, hand-made, light-tight tools that operate by harnessing light. That connection led to a functional shift: the tool for beelining became a vessel for photographic research.
The back wall is replaced with a film plate; a tiny hole drilled into the front becomes the aperture. While the honeybee gathers, I uncover the opening to the landscape she was found in, which then projects onto light sensitive material alongside her ghostly silhouette.
This iteration of the beelining pinhole camera marks the beginning of a broader exploration. New strategies and a second-generation camera with an expanded film format are currently in development. Check my blog for the latest updates.
