Spencer Vazquez


Photo
wiche: Works on Tape (2025-)
very cool, very nice (2025-)
Recent Work
selected Pinholes
Havan
immanuel j.

music Video
Chlorine (2025)
It’s Not Really About You (2024)
Splinter (2023)

about
 

Wiche: Works on Tape (2025-)

I began making work about my father—a housepainter, now dead—in an effort to do something with a few dozen old pictures that seemed to call out from my hard drive. Using the same blue 3M painter’s tape he relied on to mask the edges of a wall, I began reimagining that material as both substrate and substitute for the crisp archival print. I wanted to think about simple things like tape, copy paper, and the techniques I learned in art class when I was fifteen; and about less simple things, too, like the past and the dead, and the space each occupies in my memory, not to mention my camera roll.


At the heart of these works is a common craft technique called tape transferring, where a toner print is copied onto the surface of adhesive tape. The process is cheap and easy, though tedious at times. Cover a laser print with strips of tape. Rub it over with a spoon or some burnishing tool. Let it soak in water. Soon, the paper turns into a pulp you can smear off with your fingertips (a sponge works, too), and after a while you’ll find the image transferred over in reverse. 

I learned how to make tape transfers ten years ago, in my art class at a Chicago public high school whose funding got slashed every year like a ritual. The first ones I ever made were small cutouts, six inches tops, that I piecemealed into a collage. I made dozens, but soon after I forgot all about them. 


Sometime last year, I found myself one afternoon staring into the contents of my old hard drive. I thought about all the images and files I had amassed; about all the negatives I transformed into JPEGs so that I could post them on Instagram; about pictures I took as a teen with a Holga and those family photos I had once scanned. I thought about the screenshot of my dad’s eyes from the video he left me before he died—about all the images that haunt me and leave me wondering still. What else I could do with them?

I began asking myself how I might translate digital images into more tactile media. Sure, I could send high-res scans of a photo I took when I was sixteen to my lab for c-prints or a costly giclée. I could export a low-res JPEG and post it online. I could make a zine. I could get back into photochemical printing, but that felt inaccessible and at odds with the digital media I was working with. I felt stuck between the routes available to me. 

I set out to find a printing method that, while referencing the conventions of “classic” photography—a gelatin silver in museum glass—nonetheless yielded images that felt precarious and disposable. I was drawn to contradiction: the photograph as something iconic, valuable, and seemingly permanent; and the photograph as something that might cave in, go to pieces, and catch rogue hairs. Photographs with the spirit of a glue trap.


This work is an attempt to find new ways to engage with very old questions about how images live not only as appearance but as objects, too. At a time in which our relationship to images is strange, incessant, and mediated by things like smartphones and cloud storage, how can we find new ways to deal with the photograph’s materiality? How can we restore to these images a sense of touch—of haptic experience, of a picture that is open to the world and its debris?

The other day, at a group show in that part of Greenpoint teeming with semi-trucks and charming rowhouses, a man who had spent the last few minutes looking at my prints as he nursed a Heineken turned to me. “What do you think–” he began, warmly, “what do you think these works are about?” I told him they were about death, or memory, or something succinct like that.  But saying what a work is “about” is always tricky, like trying to pluck the hairs off a photograph made from tape, and so perhaps what I want to say is that this work is really just an ode: to grief, memory, cancer, housepainters, old friends, pixels, Puerto Ricans, the hairs on your floor, and to family.