Living Marble is an exhibition debuting the collaborative photographic practice of Yael Eban and Matthew Gamber. Assembled from both original and collected photographic objects, Eban and Gamber focus on a consumer culture fascinated with marble as an aspirational material, historical signifier, and decorative commodity. The collaboration explores marble’s ubiquity from high to low art through tropes of kitsch, trompe-l'œil, and the uncanny.

Marble as a material is often faked, simulated, replicated, or reproduced. In many cases, the forgery becomes the desired version. For instance, in the 1850s a British painter named Thomas Kershaw built a lucrative career by painting faux marble in the homes of wealthy patrons. So convincing was Kershaw’s technique that his critics accused him of using real marble in place of his own handiwork. In an evident parallel, Eban and Gamber created a new technique in the darkroom of marbling directly onto light-sensitive paper. The paper is then exposed to light and developed with chemistry, creating unique photographic objects made without a camera.

Since antiquity, marble has been used as a stand-in for divinity, the body, and even light—the word itself is derived from the Greek verb marmairein (to shine, to flash). As photography is a medium that collects and records light, it is the ideal analogy for Eban and Gamber to explore marble and its various recreations. Using a wide palette of photographic approaches, Living Marble intersects the materiality of marble with photography’s unique power to emulate and commodify surfaces.