Brooke Hammerle: Press to Play

Could heaven be a place on Earth? Brooke Hammerle’s photographs seemingly answer yes. A celestial pulse runs through her diverse scenery, from leaves reflected in water to a senior citizens’ swimming lesson. Playing with time lapses, multiple exposures and cameras both analog and digital, Hammerle depicts reality’s sensational layers.

Hammerle’s recent series Press to Play finds another paradise in the “deep space and surface reflections” of an arcade franchise. In 2014, Hammerle started snapping pictures at a Dave & Buster’s in her home city of Providence, RI. She writes that the “cavernous dark space” was full of blinking lights alternating in “hypnotic rhythm” and evoking “a sensation of levitation.”

Brooke Hammerle, Ball Fall, 2018, photograph, dye sublimation on aluminum, 24 x 36″. Courtesy of the artist.

That same skyward feeling reverberates in the resulting images. Multiple exposures add texture and transparency to the compositions. Lights fuse and stutter. Darkness is conveyed via the arcade’s dim ambience, and time suspends in the frozen motions of screens and strobes.

Occasionally Hammerle finds narrative in this transcendent atmosphere. In Ball Fall, she halts a sunset-colored orb’s descent as it slides between bumpers of light strips and red plastic, like an earthbound angel. The titular Press to Play renders a sleeker cosmos from two spectral rows of lights. The two arcs run parallel, like earth and firmament, forming a Romantic horizon with a lottery ticket palette.

Licensed characters such as Kung Fu Panda and Batman emerge in the mix of these tableaus, subtly pointing to the arcade’s seamless blending of marketing and mysticism. Still, Hammerle doesn’t cede too much territory to the arcade’s apparent commercialism. Instead she preserves the arcade as a site of ecstasy and stimulation. Few other places contain such magnificent excess and reward, in such an attractive package. This allure might even be ageless, as Providence’s own two arcade bars seem to suggest.

Hammerle depicts something timeless in a modern form. Strolling an aisle of games, she captures shades of longing and fulfillment, themes seemingly common in her work. Their avatars here are programmed lights, prize wheels and ghostly raster graphics. One image warns “Game Over,” but even this memento mori glows, offering only one possible future in this infinite space.