Jay DeFeo, Untitled, 1987

Corey Keller: What DeFeo has done here is to perform a very simple act. Is to take a Kleenex box, a tissue box and put it on the platen glass of a photocopy machine.

Narrator: Corey Keller.

Corey Keller: The photocopier operates basically like a camera. But there's something about the way a photocopier works in which something of the three dimensionality of the object that's placed on the glass is preserved.

Works made on a photocopier are both flat and three-dimensional at the same time. In the tissue box, it's very much apparent, the way the void of the hole where the tissues come out becomes very deep, and the texture of the tissue is pronounced, the pleating of the paper. It really highlights those aspects in a way that a straight photograph might not have done.