INFRATHIN IMAGES
ART AND MEDIA LAB
ISABEL BADER CENTRE FOR PREFORMING ARTS
APRIL 15 - 24, 2026
Infrathin Images
Elyse Longair
“The warmth of a seat ( which has just / been left ) is infra - thin”
“Subway gates - The people / who go through at the very last moment / infra thin -”
These notes by artist Marcel Duchamp illustrate what he coined in French as inframince, translated into English as infrathin or infraslim. For Duchamp, the term exceeded definition but could be understood through examples.
This exhibition, Infrathin Images, asks where the infrathin exists and how it informs the ways we think about and understand images, specifically collages. Longair is drawn to collages that have a flat seamless aesthetic first seen in the collaged woodgrain reproductions by Max Ernst in the 1920s and 1930s and later adapted by artists such as John Stezaker in contemporary practice who focuses on what he terms as ‘false contingencies’.
In her own practice, Longair works with analogue popular knowledge source material, spending focused time locating near-invisible moments when fragments come together as infrathin images. She expands images’ frames by overlapping images or placing two images side by side, or they are edited down through cropping. Rather than physically gluing the images together, she adheres and flattens them, or to borrow Duchamp’s thoughts, she “marries” and “invisibly weaves” them together by scanning the images and printing them on a large scale for exhibition. It is interesting that so many of Duchamp’s notes on the infrathin illustrate this beautifully:
“( verso ) Cutting ( noun ) - cutting ( adj. ) guillotine, razor blades / sliding - / Drying - gluing“
“- / adjusting registering - / repairing ( camouflage / invisible weaving or mechanical / reparation / Adhesion gluing”
“you cut and you insert / the thing”
“just touching. While trying to place 1 plane surface / precisely on another plane surface / you pass through some infra thin moments”
“The possible is / an infrathin”
“of the possible as infra / thin
The possible implying / the becoming - the passage from / one to the other takes place / in the infra thin”
Longair’s notes on infrathin images:
“When the gap or space between images is less and less ( this thin / slim space ) becoming nearly invisible is infra - thin”
“Collaging new images from different times, sources and curated histories. Time travel through infrathin. Infrathin time travel”
“The cycle between perception, representation and presentation exists in infrathin time”
“The moment when images come together seamlessly - like when a puzzle piece slides into place. tap tap.”
You are invited to take part in the creative act, as per Duchamp, and close the infrathin gap between the art, artist and audience, between the institution and the public. Duchamp illustrated this in his infrathin note, “The exchange between what one / puts on view [ the whole / setting up to put / on view ( all areas ) ] and the glacial regard of the public ( which sees and / forgets immediately ) / Very often / this exchange has the value / of an infra thin separation / ( meaning that the more / a thing is admired and looked at the less there is an inf. t. / sep.” In other words, slow down, spend time with the images and consider where the infrathin may exist.
Paul Matisse wrote about Duchamp’s infrathin notes as “the elusive and ephemeral world of the very lastness of things, the frail and the final minimum before reality disappears completely”. This exhibition, Infrathin Images, locates itself within that threshold, on the borderline of imagination and reality.