Transmitter is pleased to present to bleach, to fold, co-curated by Martha Fleming-Ives and featuring new work by Zeshan Ahmed and Yasi Alipour. 

Ahmed’s complex abstractions begin in Photoshop where he isolates the essential language of digital photography—the three distinct values of RGB, or the primary colors of light in additive synthesis. He prints red, green, and blue as solid colors on silver halide transparencies, then applies bleach in different manners and for varied increments of time. The bleach changes the tone and hue of the color printed on the transparency, at times disappearing the color completely. Together, his layered transparencies produce collages of exuberant colors and translucent marks made not through the application of color, but through its erasure.

Alipour’s tactile works on paper employ the contrary gestures of folding and unfolding. Each fold is decided upon and guided by the artist's keen interest in mathematics, particularly in how geometric principles informed the history of Islamic architecture. Working with thin black coated inkjet paper as well as in the cyanotype process, the artist’s obsessive and deliberate folds, once opened, leave a striking colorless mark—a trace created from the force of each fold. This repeated ritual transforms the otherwise flat paper surface with a three-dimensional physicality.