The Sun Does Not Move, Position 1–12, 2019 by R. H. Quaytman

Triple Canopy is pleased to announce The Sun Does Not Move, Position 1–12, a series of twelve unique silk-screened prints by R. H. Quaytman, commissioned in 2018 to honor Maggie Nelson at our annual benefit, and printed on the occasion of our 2019 benefit, honoring Joan Jonas. Since 2001, Quaytman has structured presentations of her paintings as “chapters” of a continuously written (and rewritten) “book” that constitutes her oeuvre. In so doing, her work treats paintings as objects of discourse that directly engage with the ways in which the medium is produced, circulated, presented, and received by audiences. Quaytman’s series for Triple Canopy shares its name with an exhibition of her work at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland: “The Sun Does Not Move, Chapter 35” (November 8, 2019–February 23, 2020).

The Sun Does Not Move, Position 1–12 employs many of the themes that animate Quaytman’s chapters. A set of parallel vertical lines runs across each monoprint, producing a moiré effect when viewed from certain perspectives. Behind the lines, a round object—an amalgam of a breast and the sun—appears from out of frame, progresses across the prints, and disappears. The image varies slightly from one print to the next, simulating movement. Yet, while the round object seems to phase in and out of the prints, the series’s title suggests that the object’s ostensible movement is in fact a phenomenon produced by the viewer, not the prints themselves. In The Sun Does Not Move, Position 1–12, the act of viewing is revealed to be one of contingency—an experience determined just as much by adjacent objects and their environment as by the individual item under consideration.