Quinlan, who was born and trained in Boston, works in a studio. She sets up mundane materials - Mylar, fabric, slat boards, the kind of stuff routinely used to contrive backdrops in run-of-the-mill commercial photography - and fusses about with mirrors and lighting. She brings her camera right up close to her subjects, so she can control exactly what will make it into the picture's frame and what won't.
Despite the straightforwardness - you could even say the transparency - of her technique, Quinlan's photographs are obstinately opaque. They force us to register that what we are looking at is, first and foremost, colored pieces of flat paper hanging on a wall. There's nothing behind them.
In the rare instance when these photographs do include hints of spatial recession - angled slat boards partially in focus and partially blurred in the series called "Fracas," for instance - these clues are thoroughly confused by mirrors, and by framing that makes it impossible to tell which way is up, which way down, which way left, and which right.
If the results put us in mind of early Modernist abstraction, and especially the shallow, ambiguous space of Cubism, it's not by accident. Quinlan seems motivated by the same love for optical ambiguity. And yet her interest is not in carving out a whole new pictorial language with its own set of spiritual and social implications in the manner of those early Modernists. (Like the rest of us, she arrived too late for all that.) Instead, she's in terested in prodding at the pressure point where photography's capacity for relaying facts merges with its habit of betraying the truth.
