NADA Miami 2023

Gail Thacker is an artist based in New York City since 1982. For the past 30 years, the New York photographer has documented her community of queer artists on meticulously distressed Polaroid film.
Gail was recently featured in I-D magazine where Lydia Figes wrote “In the 80s, around the peak of the AIDS crisis, the New York-based photographer Gail Thacker stumbled upon a novel way to experiment with Polaroids. “One day, after shooting with Polaroid 665 positive/negative film,” she tells us, “I was too tired and didn’t rinse the negatives.” Instead, she wrapped them in plastic and put them in the closet, forgetting about them soon after. A few months later, she returned to rinse them, but to her surprise, they had decayed and were stuck together. The accident led to interesting aesthetic results. In the artist’s own words: “they were reflective of life, ageing and chaos. Fractals had formed and painterly sweeps of blue”.
A monograph, Between the Sun and Moon: Gail Thacker’s Polaroids, with essays by Barbara Hitchcock, Jonathan David Katz and Eileen Myles, was published by QCC Art Gallery Press of the City University of New York in 2017. Thacker’s work is included in the collections of the City University of New York; Leslie–Lohman Museum of Art, New York; New York Public Library; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Galicia, Spain, as well as in numerous private collections in the United States and abroad. Thacker has lived and worked in New York City since 1982.
We met Gail through the gallery. Her work was featured in our third show Movement of the Triangle.