Artist statement: Justine Varga’s artistic practice demonstrates a sustained interrogation of what we assume photographs to be, and what we expect them to do. Utilising physical manipulations of the material surfaces she works with, Varga touches, smears and inverts negatives, she layers and overlaps exposures, she retains the visual residue of their processes of becoming.
Convention leads us to believe that the photographic border delineates a fixed edge, a boundary by which the artwork is made separate from the world. We construct borders in order to contain, to rationalise, and to unify. ‘Overlay’, at first glance, contains a profusion of borders. But this first glance misleads, for the image slowly unravels such presumptions, offering us an intricate process of disentanglement. – Kirsty Baker
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Chromogenic prints are printed on paper that has at least three emulsion layers containing invisible dyes and silver salts. Each emulsion layer is sensitive to a different primary colour of light (red, green or blue). The development process converts the hidden dyes to visible colour depending on the amount of light it was exposed to. This type of paper is commonly used to print from colour negatives or digital files to produce a full-colour image. It can also be used to print black-and-white images, giving softer grain and less contrast than gelatin silver prints. Commonly known as c-type prints, chromogenic processing was developed in the 1940s and widely used for colour printing, including for domestic snapshots. While recent years have seen this process accompanied by ink-jet and digital printing technologies, chromogenic printing still remains in use to this day.
