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Artist Spencer Vazquez discusses Glue Traps, his exhibition investigating the emotional, nostalgic, and archival dimensions of photography.
In Glue Traps, Vazquez attempts to reckon with his own archive. Prompted by the discovery of a long-lost hard drive and the death of his father, a housepainter, Vazquez began asking how he might engage again with the sprawling photo diary he had assembled over the last decade. Faced with thousands of files—ranging from recent portraits of his father post-chemo to old family polaroids to rolls he shot as a teenager—Vazquez started contemplating the material future of these images. He sought a printing method that was at once ephemeral and tangible: a process that could get around the aesthetic and economic limitations of traditional fine art printing, and one that nodded to classic photographic conventions while also embracing the medium’s inherent contradictions.
Glue Traps is on display at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York, 154 Ludlow Street, NYC, through June 3, 2026.
View a selection of works discussed in the episode:
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