CURRENT EXHIBITION

Glue Traps

BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York is thrilled to present Glue Traps, an exhibition of works by 2026 BAXTER ST & YoungArts Recipient Spencer Vazquez, on view from April 16 to June 3, 2026. In an era when images are endlessly mediated through digital channels, Vazquez investigates the haptic potential of photography alongside its emotional, nostalgic, and archival dimensions.

In Glue Traps, Vazquez attempts to reckon with his own archive. Prompted by the discovery of a long-lost hard drive and the death of his father, a housepainter, Vazquez began asking how he might engage again with the sprawling photo diary he had assembled over the last decade. Faced with thousands of files—ranging from recent portraits of his father post-chemo to old family polaroids to rolls he shot as a teenager—Vazquez started contemplating the material future of these images. He sought a printing method that was at once ephemeral and tangible: a process that could get around the aesthetic and economic limitations of traditional fine art printing; and one that nodded to classic photographic conventions while also embracing the medium’s inherent contradictions.

At the heart of this work is tape transferring, a widely accessible yet labor-intensive process in which toner prints are transferred onto adhesive tape, producing images in reverse through a sequence of rubbing, soaking, and peeling. Often associated with DIY craft and collage-based practices, this technique is repurposed here as a method for producing full-scale prints. Vazquez also employs a “reverse transfer” process, printing directly onto the tape’s top surface and stitching panels together into a scroll-like grid. What began as an experiment with everyday materials developed into a practice that reflects on memory, mourning, and the shifting material conditions of images in a state of overproduction. At times employing the same blue 3M painter’s tape his father once used, Vazquez sets out to find what purpose these images can serve now and how they might be reactivated.

Complimenting these works on tape is a triptych of large pigment prints, each image made by scanning the surface of Vazquez’s phone screen as it plays a video on loop. Recording an image line by line as a sensor moves across the glass, the flatbed scanner captures the phone screen over several seconds rather than in a single instant. When scanning videos, the screen continues refreshing and advancing frames during the scan, producing stripe-like bands and choppy distortions as time is translated into space. The resulting images are familiar yet distorted, as though we were watching the hallucinations of an iPhone’s camera roll.

Throughout this process, Vazquez gives new life to this photographic heap, expanding on the notion that images lead double lives as both object and appearance. The resulting works are as much meditations on materiality as they are odes to the banal and inscrutable parts of everyday life: grief, memory, cancer, housepainters, old friends, pixels, the hairs on the floor, and to family.

About Spencer Vazquez
Spencer Vazquez (b. 2000) is a Chicago-born artist currently based in Queens, NY. Vazquez’s work explores the intersection of memory, digital media, and the everyday image. Using a range of cameras and photographic processes, his work spans documentary portraits, adhesive tape transfers, music videos, panoramic pinholes, and flatbed scans of his phone screen. He received a BA in Film & Electronic Arts from Bard College in 2022. Glue Traps is his first solo exhibition.

About the YoungArts BAXTER ST Exhibition Program
The YoungArts BAXTER ST exhibition partnership is a unique opportunity for New York City-based YoungArts award winners working in the field of photography and video to gain experience and visibility, and build a community for their first solo exhibition at BAXTER ST. The opportunity includes a financial subsidy to produce a solo show in the BAXTER ST gallery as well as access to the BAXTER ST’s digital workspace, resources, and the BAXTER ST Art Advisory Committee.⁠

About YoungArts
YoungArts is the only national organization that champions artists throughout their lifetimes and across all art forms, fueling the ongoing vitality of the arts nationwide. Building on 45 years of impact, the organization is galvanizing a dynamic ecosystem of support with hundreds of world-class cultural institutions across the country, enabling artists to more effectively shape and sustain their careers. Artists gain lifelong access to critical resources—including funding, incubation and presentation opportunities, mentorship, and professional development — beginning with early recognition as YoungArts Award winners. Through an intergenerational and interdisciplinary network of 24,000 artists, YoungArts cultivates community and drives innovation, collaboration, and career-defining opportunities.