Eileen Quinlan: Line Call at Miguel Abreu Gallery

Eileen Quinlan, born in Boston in 1972, earned her MFA at Columbia University in 2005. She had her first solo museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2009, and her first survey, Wait For It, at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 2019. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim, among many others, and she took part in the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Line Call is her eighth solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery. The photographs span twenty years, and older images are put to new uses beside works shown for the first time. Among the new pieces are snapshots of friends, family and intimate spaces, printed and mounted without alteration. They stand against her heavily processed digital work, and they raise the burden photography has carried since its beginnings, the promise to capture and preserve, in a practice more often concerned with instability, change and decay.

The second thread is the line. It traces the contour of a field or an image in one work and appears only by chance in another. It can mark an absence or point beyond the frame. Her newest works are UV-cured inkjet prints on mirror, with images that appear to overrun their frames.

Each work comes with a note from the artist. First Day is a phone photograph of her daughter in front of the corrugated facade where she photographed her children every first day of school, left uncropped. Brother Feud shows a rusty fence at a North Fork vineyard that divided the land of two estranged brothers; the expired film turned the image pink. Cheyney's Studio with Gremlins and Withers Demo record the Williamsburg studio building she shared with other artists from 1999 until it was demolished in 2024. Survivor Moon comes from photographs of a television screen during lockdown, and Silent Passage belongs to her series of eggs cracked on a flatbed scanner.

Mormon Hollow Tangle, made with studiomate B. McLister, is a nine-panel work in which a laser engraver burned a photograph of a salvaged car's interior through layers of paint. Swipe Set (Egg Rock) is an accidental image from an unexposed, expired Polaroid negative.

The gallery is at 88 Eldridge Street in Chinatown, open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm. The show runs through October 31.