Galerie Miranda in Paris is presenting a comprehensive solo exhibition featuring the work of Franco-American artist Nancy Wilson-Pajic (born 1941), titled "Object, shadow, text." The exhibition showcases works from the artist's personal archives, highlighting her early and lesser-known pieces while demonstrating the diversity of research and experimental processes she has explored throughout her five-decade career in France and internationally.
For more than fifty years, Nancy Wilson-Pajic has investigated the essential functions of photography as a medium and examined the role of art and artists in society. This new solo exhibition at Galerie Miranda presents a collection of works drawn from the artist's personal archives, specifically chosen to illuminate her early and relatively unknown pieces. The selection emphasizes the diversity of her research and the richness of experimental processes she has developed throughout her career, spanning from her early feminist expressions of the 1970s to her pioneering explorations of traditional photographic processes in the 1980s and 1990s.
Wilson-Pajic initially used photography to document her artistic works, including performances, ephemeral installations, and site-specific interventions. Beginning in the 1980s, she began questioning how photographic images impose themselves on our vision, asking fundamental questions about what transforms a photograph into a work of art. During this period, she experimented with alternative printing processes and so-called "poor" materials, including Xerox copies, plastic, paper, and paint.
The artist then embarked on an extensive exploration of photograms, investigating this historical photographic form as a trace through the unique relationship it establishes between objects and their imprints via the shadows they leave behind. This research resulted in a major and poetic body of work featuring large cyanotypes of disembodied textiles, including haute couture dresses by Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen, and Christian Lacroix, antique laces, stage costumes, and everyday objects.
The exhibition brings together several emblematic conceptual series. These include "Perfect Shade of Gray" (1978-1979), a series of eight works combining photography and painting in an "anti-aesthetic" project that embodies the artist's early questioning of authorial position and photography's representative function. "Drifter" (1983-1987) features a collection of large-format gum bichromate prints mixing text and image, created from photographs taken with a rudimentary camera from a car on highways in the Parisian suburbs.
The show also features large-format cyanotype photograms from the series "Falling Angels" (1995-1997) and "Les Divas" (2004), as well as several unique self-portraits from the 1970s. The exhibition's title references "shadow," connecting to the experimental camera-less photography of the 1920s developed by Christian Schad (1894-1982), which Tristan Tzara called "schadographs." Tzara described these as "small compositions of torn paper, newspaper, and fabric arranged on sheets of photographic paper, pressed under glass, and exposed to light on the balcony—traces of small debris from daily life."
"Nancy Wilson-Pajic: Object, shadow, text" runs until January 3, 2026, at Galerie Miranda, located at 21 rue du Château d'Eau, 75010 Paris. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 2:00 PM to 7:00 PM, or by appointment. For more information, visitors can contact the gallery at +33 1 40 38 36 53 or visit www.galeriemiranda.com.
