Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present Color Electrograms 1978–2022, an exhibition of twelve photographs by Kerry Schuss. Long celebrated for his namesake gallery and singular program dedicated to visionary, contemporary art, this exhibition marks Schuss’s second solo presentation of his own work, and his first solo show in Los Angeles.

Color Electrograms 1978–2022 includes a group of six vintage SX-70 Polaroids and six recent dye sublimation prints on aluminum made using 4x5 color transparencies Schuss created in 1978. The images in these twelve photographs were realized using Kirlian photography, a technique that employs high-voltage current to directly expose film in the darkroom without the use of a camera. Schuss fashioned his own device with the aid of a Tesla coil to produce high-voltage, low-current electricity, which he applied to small copper squares—measuring one, two and three inches each—placed directly onto the film.

Using a wire connected to the Tesla coil, Schuss touched one of the copper squares resting on the surface of the film; the arcing current then traveled between the pieces of copper by way of the metals in the film’s emulsion. During this process of electrifying the film, he also used colored lights to generate unpredictable effects: tracery that resembles lightning, geometric silhouettes burned into the film, and a spectrum of highly saturated color. These chance operations pushed the film’s capacity for color to its maximum and created visually complex, reflexive images that are at once bodily and otherworldly.

The six SX-70 Polaroids on view in the exhibition exemplify the immediate results of Schuss’s late-seventies hybrid process which combines electricity and light to create photographic images. His recent dye sublimation prints, on the other hand, are the result of a circuitous path he couldn’t have anticipated or realized in 1978. From 1976 to 1981, while living in a loft above Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, Schuss made hundreds of prints, negatives, and transparencies, all of which he kept in storage for thirty-five years. He continued to work seriously as an artist, creating work in various mediums—sculpture, printmaking, and installation—until 1998, when he opened his gallery. “The gallery became my main creative outlet; without intending it, I took a twenty-year hiatus from making my own work.”

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Inspired by his friend and peer Mitchell Algus, who organized an exhibition of 1970s conceptual photography in 2016, Schuss returned to his stored pieces and discovered the strength and possibility of the work he had begun four decades ago. Reprising these, for the past six years, Schuss has used digital technology to enlarge the 1978 color transparencies and print these new images directly onto aluminum with a dye sublimation process. The six new prints on view evidence the continued, generative possibilities of a project Schuss started as a young artist. He explains,

A distinctive quality of the medium of photography is that prints can be made many years after the film is exposed. Using digital scanning and printing processes that weren’t available at the time the transparencies were made, I can now produce larger prints with the sharpness of the original film, opening up the images and revealing new visual information that was previously hidden.

Over the past seven years I’ve been printing these images created by my twenty-six-year-old self and coming to understand them as gifts, which I couldn’t fully comprehend when I made them. The compositions have the freedom and experimentation that someone feels in their twenties. I now realize how fortunate artists are who can look back at their earlier work when they’re older, and see how things evolve and add up.