mckenna & timmermeister
Isaac McKenna
Kurt Timmermeister
4th September - 18th October 2025
Opening 5pm Thursday 4th September
In the patient, handmade work of Isaac McKenna and Kurt Timmermeister, we encounter two artists who use their photographic processes as a means of revealing truth. McKenna's landscapes on hand-coated glass plates allow emulsion drips and surface scratches to remain, making visible the very fallibility that most photography seeks to hide. Timmermeister's portraits, created in the timeless isolation of an underground cave, document the slow revelation of character that emerges when subjects are freed from modern distractions.
Both artists work with traditional black and white processes, yet their approaches feel anything but traditional. Through their chosen methods—McKenna working with glass plates and large format cameras, Timmermeister using medium format film in his converted cheese cave studio—they create images that cannot lie about their own making. These photographs offer something increasingly rare: an honest accounting of both the world before the lens and the human hand behind it.
isaac mckenna
These images are made on silver gelatin dry plates, a labor intensive process. I cut, sand, and clean of sheets of glass, and then pour two layers onto it — one to improve adhesion, and upon it a light sensitive silver gelatin mixture. Using large format view cameras that I built with a 3D printer, I take the plates into the environment and make negatives.
In my work, I am interested in the fraught role of the photograph in a society where images are ubiquitous. Despite the improvement in image fidelity over the last century, the photograph has retained its capacity for deceit. There are still all of the same problems of human perspective, the limitations of personal experience, the translation of light to photographic medium, and the new problems of digitally edited and generated images. Though images may soon appear to be the ‘real world’, they will remain illusory objects.
In response, I make images with a sculptural quality: curling and dripping emulsion, scratched glass, and even fingerprints are integral to the composition. The coating process involves both intentionality and chance, leaving patterns of bubbles and drip lines across the image surface, often obscuring or altering the representation of subject matter. There is a constant push and pull in these images between the unmatched resolution of large format photography and the fallibility of the medium, between illusion and immediacy. I ask questions about the American landscape tradition and its roots in extraction and colonialism — my work questions the false separation between humans and nature, as well as subject and object.
An ongoing project documenting glacial erratic boulders, which were carried far from their geological origin during the last ice age, is made under growing fascist repression of immigration. I consistently struggle with the ability of ‘landscape’ or environmental photography to express a coherent politics, but I find that the wisdom of the non-human world may provide direction — in this case access to a deeper consideration of what it means to migrate or remain. Another dry plate series shows trees growing from stumps at Rattlesnake Lake, formerly the town of Moncton, WA. The town was flooded in the early 20th century due to poorly planned dam construction, and I found a powerful analogy in the resistance of the natural world against ecological disaster.
Across my entire practice is a central interest in time, from geological and glacial timescales to the moment of photographic exposure. In these images, the fractal scales of time are shown simultaneously: objects weathered by glaciers or floods over millennia, symbiotic relationships between algae and fungi in lichen patterns, the chemical weathering of the image itself, the timescale of the actual exposure. Above all, I hope that in addressing these complex contradictions, there is something about this work which offers the possibility of reconciling them.
bio
Isaac McKenna is a photographer, sculptor, and artist based in Seattle, WA. They graduated with honors in Visual Art from Brown University. Their work centers around questions of temporality, image-subject collapse, and the perspective of natural environments. Using 3D-printed cameras and alternative photographic processes, they create unique images which emphasize their physicality and fallibility.
Instagram: @isaacmckenna.jpg
kurt timmermeister
I grew up surrounded by picture taking in a distinctly analogue age of the mid 70s. I learned to work in the darkroom in school, in an era when every high school and many middle schools offered photography classes and had onsite darkrooms. Primarily I shot 35mm but also found antique large format cameras and began shooting sheet film.
It was not till much later in life that I returned to shooting photographs. I was working on a cookbook proposal and wanted photographs to illustrate the book. As I was most familiar with the subject, I decided to shoot it myself. I rented a Hasselblad for a long weekend and attempted to capture a series of images that could accompany the book proposal. Pleased enough with the results, I continued on, first finishing two of the food books and then moving into black and white images. In the process I set up a large darkroom and began shooting portraits.
Presently my studio is located at my farm on Vashon Island. For years I raised dairy cows and made cheese. In a bit of a folly, many years earlier I had created a large, subterranean cave with a barrel vaulted ceiling deep under the pastures. After the last cheeses were made and the herd of cows reduced to just a few, I realized that the no-longer-needed cheese cave would make a remarkable photography studio.
The cave has no windows, no sound reaches the interior and time stands still there. It is a walk from the house up the pastures and down into the cave. When someone enters the cave there are no distractions for them; nothing to see or hear, no pings from a phone, and very little sense of time.
The art that I make: the physical prints — the portraits — are just the final part of the process. I find the person, invite them over and then walk them up the pasture to this unexpected and rather hidden door. And then I get to spend some time with them. Maybe just a half an hour but generally an hour or two. They talk and reveal who they are, slowly relaxing as the modern world falls away. I get to find what is interesting about them; what is special. As I shoot roll after roll of medium format film, I get to capture a sense of them, a likeness of them.
And the process continues as I move to the darkroom and process the film, and then begin printing the images, hoping to have one or maybe two that I love. The print is the record of that afternoon that we spent together. That brief time when they reveal a bit about themselves. And with a bit of luck, I managed to capture in a final print.
The work that I make reflects the space where the images are captured, the analog process that I utilize and my intent. I stick with film and making silver gelatin prints because it is the process that I grew up with; I know it and I need the physicality of it. I want a stack of prints in my hand after an afternoon in the darkroom. Most are too light or too dark, or filled with spots or just wrong. But with time and patience, there will be one that I enjoy and that reflects the person that came to the farm and spent time with me in the studio.
https://kurttimmermeisterphotography.com/
Instagram: @ktimmermeister
