“There is not one solution to an aesthetic problem,” claimed Joseph Albers; his successors, and those interested in the everlasting question of the relationship between material, form and function should have listened carefully to this maxim.

Jemima Stehli seems to be studying formalist language in her recent photographic and video investigations. Whilst standing out of the frame, in the video Large Perspex (2006), she has worked with the artist Lewis Amar, giving him instructions to manipulate a sheet of Plexiglass; in another series of photographs from a filmed performance in Lisbon he manoeuvres Stehli’s body in relation to a Larry Bell sculpture, whilst also using his body as a sculptural prop.

In Large Perspex, Stehli is examining the language of material investigations practised by artists like Moholy-Nagy, who incidentally was one of the first to work with plastics. Amar drags and lifts the sheet of Plexi under Stehli’s instructions, he bends it and then flexes it to the pulsating rhythm of heavy music. We see reflections on its surface, at times making Amar invisible and Stehli holding the camera visible, revealing the architectural confines of the studio.

The filmed performance at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, in contrast, investigates the relation between effort and effect in the work of art, as materialized in Larry Bell’s Untitled (Horizontal Gradient) (1995). Like Albers, Bell was fascinated by the effects of light and colour on perception, playing with veiling and mirroring, by using coloured metal-inflected glass. Stehli has worked closely here with the properties of the sculpture, experimenting with different viewpoints, choosing sometimes to set the edge of the vertical panels perpendicular to the camera, using them like axes of symmetry.

Bell calls for the viewer to interact and penetrate his sculptures, and Stehli follows his directive while also filming and taking a series of photographs of the action. But she has taken the idea of the work’s heightening of the viewer’s sensory experience of the environment further. Again, Stehli is experimenting with the idea of the separation of the point of view from the shutter’s placement by working with the reflective properties of the sculpture: every so often the viewer comes face to face with the cameras.

Stehli continues to place herself as a nude protagonist in the work, and therefore asks what body the sculpture is put in relation to, and what that physical experience might entail. Stehli offers her body to the fully clothed Amar, who works under instruction to manipulate it in relation to the piece and to compose the image. Yet despite this objectifying gesture, and even though she might be unaware at the time of making of the outcome of the final image, Stehli retains ultimate control by keeping hold of the shutter release cable as the author of the final image. She thus not only avoids being seen simply in material or formal terms but also remains in control of her collaborator. Interesting moments occur when the figures of the protagonists seem to merge when there are bodily mutation and duplication, or when Amar is hardly visible.

And so Stehli problematizes the reading of form through re-contextualisation. Playing with photography’s inherent voyeuristic properties as author and object within the work, she is working on the double-edge of reification by putting material and form to the test through the use of an alternative language. Unlike some current trends in appropriation of Modernist language, Stehli’s investigations bring current issues and experiences into play. By using artistic collaboration as a means, and the body as a tool within a photographic framework, Jemima Stehli’s work imparts a sense of precise confusion.