[COLOR/SHIFT]

Filter Photo is pleased to present [color/shift], a solo exhibition by Travis Shaffer, who works under the publishing alias theretherenow.

[color/shift] is a conceptual art project masquerading as a technical resource—a gathering of material evidence around a theoretical question: How might photographic color be constructed outside the standardized frameworks of industrial process color?

The project begins with the Risograph digital duplicator: a high-speed, low-cost machine designed for informational printing and, by almost any conventional measure, the wrong tool for photographic reproduction. Its proprietary spot-color inks, coarse screens, unstable registration, and tendency toward variation resist the transparency and fidelity that photographic printing has been engineered to deliver.

[color/shift] deliberately imposes the tools of industrial color science onto this inadequate system, producing a useful contradiction. Rather than using color management to control the machine toward fidelity, theretherenow embraces infidelity—building bespoke color models from the Riso’s limited and idiosyncratic inks and asking what becomes possible when color is chosen rather than inherited.

At the center of the exhibition are the ongoing Color Studies, made in collaboration with an international group of contemporary photographers. Each begins as a negotiation between photographer, image, paper, ink, and screening. Photographs are reconstructed in combinations of two to six spot colors, producing versions rather than reproductions.

Alongside these works, an accumulation of tests, proofs, charts, offprints, and research material exposes the otherwise invisible labor of that translation.

[color/shift] is ultimately aimed at photographic reproduction as an act of versioning. Against the frictionless circulation of digital images and the art world’s investment in authenticity, scarcity, and provenance, the project wagers instead on infidelity and slippage.

To print is to hand the photograph off. [color/shift] permits the image to become something—perhaps anything—else.

About the Artist

Travis Shaffer is an artist working under the publishing alias theretherenow. His artist’s books and publications are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art—which maintains a complete archive of theretherenow publications—Tate, SFMOMA, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, the National Gallery of Art, the Rijksmuseum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Harvard Fine Arts Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

His work has been exhibited at C/O Berlin; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn; FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême; Les Rencontres d’Arles; Gagosian Gallery in New York, Paris, and Beverly Hills; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Printed Matter; the San Francisco Center for the Book; and the Print Center, Philadelphia. In 2021, two theretherenow titles were shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation International Photobook Awards.

Shaffer is Associate Professor in the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri, where [color/shift] was initiated with support from the University of Missouri System’s Tier 3 Strategic Investment Program. The macOS [color/shift] application was developed during a 2026 residency at Light Work. The [color/shift] book is forthcoming from Draw Down Books.