Lucy’s Skaer’s installation Rachel, Peter, Caitlin, John takes as its starting point a set of arbitrary shapes formed by the ticket punches used by railroad conductors. Simultaneously punching these shapes into 16mm films and stretching them into sculptures, Skaer treats them as ciphers of singularity, repetition, difference, and negation. She stages a complex economy in which to re-think possibilities of images amidst a profuse reproduction of forms. Skaer’s installation comprises three 16mm films, each of which depicts a highly auratic subject: one shows pages from a Gutenberg Bible, recorded at the Morgan Library in New York; another closely follows the roaming eye of a cat; and the third shows Mark Rothko paintings hanging in the Kunstsammlung K20, Düsseldorf and the Museum Folkwang, Essen. Frame by frame, sections of each film have been punctured or voided with the different ticket punches. The shapes of the punches are unique—as each form has to identify which conductor was on each train—and yet infinitely repeatable. Projected on the walls of the space, the shapes carve holes into the images, flickering subliminally like a structuralist film, or communicating through an hermetic syntax. As though materializing the missing part of each film, a series of sculptural objects displayed amidst the projections gives physical form to the voided shapes of the ticket punches. Each is made from a different material, which references a dense history of sculpture forms: porcelain, pewter, bronze, copper, burmese blackwood, and plaster. In contrast to the film (a medium whose essence is reproducibility), these objects behave as “prototypes”—at the same time mute and charged with a potential for action or transformation. Like the Gutenberg Bible—which was the first mass-produced book, embodying in its movable type an estrangement of object and source—Skaer’s installation triangulates around poles of uniqueness and reproducibility, asking not only how we might “name” something or someone as unique (i.e. Rachel, Peter, Caitlin, John), but also, self-reflectively posing a complex question of what it is to look at or be looked at by a “singular” work of art. Watch Lucy Skaer and Chrissie Iles discuss this project:  http://vimeo.com/15334094