Pool, Micaela Benedicto

Micaela Benedicto’s Pool extends her sustained inquiry into time, material, geometry, and the conditions of visibility. The installation exposes the photograph’s material basis, reconfiguring it as a surface that mirrors, distorts, and absorbs reflection. Composed of twenty-eight silver photograms laid on the floor, the work forms a kind of mirror-pool, an expanse of light and metal that appears alternately solid and liquid, flat and abyssal. Produced through the darkroom’s chemical choreography rather than through the capture of external forms, each photogram registers light, time, and reaction as residue on the paper. In this process, nothing—or nothing other than process itself—is rendered as image. What remains are not representations of the world or the objects within it but temporal impressions, silver precipitates of moments that have passed, returned as luminous matter.

Over time, the silver discolors, altering the surface of each photogram and, with it, the appearance of the installation as a whole. Air and light continue the work begun in the darkroom, transforming exposure into a slow and visible oxidation. Each sheet records this process differently, so that no two surfaces age in the same way. What the work presents, then, is not a completed image but an evolving field whose changes register the passage of time as material event. The reflective plane becomes a measure of duration, its tonal shifts revealing how preservation and decay coincide in the same act of fixation.

Placed edge to edge, the twenty-eight photograms form a single plane that is also a grid. Each individual sheet already distorts the reflection it offers; together they compose a field of distortions, a surface that mirrors the very impossibility of reflection it depicts. Still visible, the seams between the sheets register division as part of the work’s structure, extending the instability of each image across a field that thereby remains not whole. In this way, the pool offers no illusion of continuity. Its unity lies only in the recurrence of fracture, or in the way every part sustains the surface’s condition of unrest.

The pool thus proposes reflection as a temporal condition rather than a visual event. What it returns is not likeness but change, not self-knowledge but a record of loss and alteration. The mirror no longer promises resemblance; it offers instead an image in motion that carries the trace of its own disfiguration. The viewer’s presence is absorbed into this process, appearing and dissolving within the same mutable surface that bears the evidence of time.

In this sense, Pool continues Benedicto’s inquiry into how photographic processes translate temporal phenomena into spatial experience. By bringing the photogram down to the floor, she turns the image into ground—a plane that both reflects and withholds. The installation invites viewers to look down rather than ahead, to encounter themselves as part of a scene that remains incomplete and that is always already receding into memory. The desire to see oneself and one’s world clearly persists, but the work makes visible the failure that sustains it. What the viewer faces in the end is not her own image, nor any promise of coherence, but the absence that the photogram renders visible and through which both image and self are constituted.

Bobby Benedicto

Department of Art History and Communication Studies

McGill University

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