Across a sequence of thirteen digital prints, the torso of a woman slowly rotates as if photographed in stop-motion: first we see the back of her head, then the side of her face; in this print—the sixth in the series—her eyes meet ours. As her gaze locks with the viewer’s, there is the potential for a brief act of exchange—if only for an instant. To make these images, the artist modified the glass bed of a digital scanner to turn it into a device that would record with an almost three-dimensional, tactile vision.
Of her intentions in this series, Donnelly has written, “I thought if you could hit that nexus in the axis of the slow path of two tubular forms either lightening or reflecting (or eating) the projected image, you could expand the thing: into some zone between the film-pattern-flash phenomenon of motion and the paralyzed known of the photographic still. Somewhere in there was a newer dimension I had hoped to catch on paper or file.”
Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)