By Taylor Dafoe, May 10, 2025
Many photographers are tempted to turn their lens back on the ingredients of the medium—that is, to make pictures of the tools used to make pictures. The appeal makes sense: in this closed loop is a kind of built-in metaphor for the limitations of photography itself. This is fertile ground, conceptually speaking, but even the richest examples tend to come out cold and clinical. That’s not the case in “My image is a lens,” the Brooklyn-based, gender-queer artist Rowan Renee’s new show at island in New York. They are ostensibly taking a similar approach, drawing on the trappings of a darkroom as a framing device, but Renee has a different metaphor in mind.
Hand-made glass negatives imprinted with a recurring set of self-portraits from the artist's own decade-old archive adorn much of the gallery, some presented in pairs and wall-mounted atop small brass armatures, others incorporated into larger, more sculptural installations. The transparency of these negatives is key; just as we see their pictures, we also see through them. Whereas some formalist photographers push us to consider images through the flawed systems that produce them, Renee invites us to look through their own body.
In these archival photos, you can see a younger version of the artist trying to locate themselves through the conventions of self-portraiture. Renee appears nude in many, often accompanied by the specter of violence. Their lank body is twisted in ribbon in one shot, obscured by a buffalo skull in another. Old axes and rifles appear throughout. Light leaks add a ghostly glow. These photos are mixed and matched, making any kind of linear timeline hard to chart, though, a trajectory still comes through. In these images, we can see an artist coming into themselves. Just as Renee transforms their archival portraits, so too do we witness the transformation of their body—aging, changing, before and after top surgery. We also see an artist evolving into their own voice.
In the center of the gallery’s main exhibition room, Renee’s glass negatives fill a darkroom sink and several skeletal negative carriers attached to it. From a distance, “The Darkroom in Four Parts” (2025) is imposing—all angles and industrial heft. But up close, the steel accentuates the delicacy of the glass, and the whole thing suddenly feels fragile. A fountain keeps water roiling over the pictures in the tub, suggesting that even though these images are static, they are still in a state of change. Like most pieces in the show, this is an artwork meant to be felt as much as seen.
Hanging from the ceiling nearby is “Projector” (2025). A rather literal embodiment of the show’s title, it features a wooden light box fitted with one of Renee’s buffalo skull portraits hovering above an enlarger lens. If this is indeed a projector as its name tells us, it’s not a particularly efficient one. Light spills from the encasement, leaving the projected picture a faint blur on the floor below. The inefficacy of this crude apparatus compels us to consider it from a different perspective, ideally lying on the ground, looking up through the lens in reverse.
This doesn’t provide a clean image either, as Renee’s self-portrait is telescoped into abstraction by the lens. But clean images are not what they are after. Expertly executed artworks are often less interesting than those that reveal their creators still grappling with the prompts they’ve posed, and that is very much the case in “My image is a lens.” Rowan Renee is feeling their way through the work and archive just as we are. You can see their hand in every piece; in some you can literally see the artist’s fingerprints. The vulnerability on view in this Lower East Side gallery is glass-like, but the effect hits like metal.
Taylor Dafoe is a writer and photographer. His work has appeared in BOMB, Cultured, Frieze, and Interview, among other publications.
ROWAN RENEE "Glas negative 9 I have a secret to tell you", 2025.
ROWAN RENEE "Glass Negative 7 A soft exhale", 2025.
ROWAN RENEE "Negative Carrier for The Darkroom in Four Parts (detail)" 2025.
ROWAN RENEE "Projector", 2025.
ROWAN RENEE "The Darktoom in Four Parts (detail)", 2025.