Used in removing material from a surface, sandpaper is also the carrier of what has been subtracted. Normally discarded when the abrasive layer is worn down or saturated with particles, in Love Streams, sandpaper acts as a recurring background for a series of
frottages. The rubbings were made with escitalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) prescribed to the artist in oral form for the treatment of depression and generalized anxiety disorder. What should have been ground by the body has been ground down by
hand, capturing the floor and walls of the artist’s studio through a process of automatic frottage and mark making. The ingestible (and thus invisible) substance is repurposed as a raw material in apparitions that lay bare connections between body, psyche, and biopolitical structures.

Dora Budor produced the Terror Terroir series in Berlin through a subtractive effacement of the city’s surfaces. Budor rubbed large sheets of sandpaper directly on the metal surfaces of a variety of shareable e-scooters, as well as the city’s overground drain infrastructure—colored pipes used to pump water from Berlin’s swampland foundations into the canals during construction. Doubling as an act of guerilla intervention and a reflection of forms of circulation throughout the city, Budor’s mark-making conjures an abstracted topography.

Margaret Honda’s Film Path drawings show the paths that motion picture film follows as it passes through different cameras, moving from unexposed raw stock to exposed footage. A film path maps the interior space of a camera, a space whose ability to produce visible images requires that it remain invisible while in use.

Honda traced the 63 drawings from the diagrams in the seventh (1993) and tenth (2015) editions of the American Cinematographer Manual. They’re framed in groups following the order in the Manuals: by gauge—35mm, 16mm, and 65mm—and within each gauge the cameras are alphabetical by manufacturer and model; VistaVision and IMAX, as special formats, come last.