Category: Images

SURREAL LANDSCAPE

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

 

  • 2018, Over The Streambed A Body Formed From the Light Refracted in Waves.

SURREAL LANDSCAPE, 2016-2019, film photography.

Surreal Landscapes use the medium of photography to look at the ways of seeing. The vision of nature presented in the series are textural. Framing abstract forms in nature, an emphasis of materiality of image is presented. This materiality becomes mirrored in the psyche by the field of vision. Aesthetic relationships stir ethical conversations on the relationship between humans and nature. Using the distinct qualities of imaging technology by enhancing the scanner’s interpretation of film, the photographic image becomes the technocratic age’s take on pointillism. The tradition in painting transferred into contemporaneity, invites the viewer to open to the various methods in which an image can be read and understood while relating to values of beauty and landscape as principles guiding emotional and behavioural choices related to the environment.

In a Streambed a Body Formed in the Light Refracted from Waves & An Apophatic Knowing of Water.
Uncanny and sublime, the exposures were made with a rangefinder camera at the edge of the Akerselva River. The river running through Oslo, Norway, provides sources of energy and revival for the city. The physical nature of the river and psychological nature of image making overlap within the image reflecting the surrounding landscape refracted in the waves.
The colour pigments are enhanced from the Kodak Gold profile. The film noted for popularity in the regular market ties the sublime qualities in the everyday subject to the everyday material. The tones are often noted for warm and magenta colour casts. Magenta is understood to be the colour that does not exist on a frequency wavelength; the colour is one humans make up with their minds. Amber is a resin with a relationship to the electron in that it can be slightly negatively charged.

MANGANESE 2019

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

 

MANGANESE, 2019, film photography, sizes variable. The film exposures from beneath a budding tree in spring are cast in a light reminiscent of the mineral Manganese. The element related to the metabolic processes within the human body are also used in manufacturing to prevent corrosion. The images aesthetically work to create reverence with the relationship humans have with nature. In high concentrations, Manganese is lethal, and in deficits cause great pain. Therefore balance is necessary with energy, nature, human bodies, their motivations and choices. As Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just, Beauty offers experiences leading to resolutions of inner turmoil.

 

AMBER (CHASMAL) 2019

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

 

AMBER (CHASMAL), 2019, photography. As a substance used in ancient folk medicine, Amber (Chasmal), was understood as electrical conductor. Accumulated sap hardened over time was used to protect the body from harmful energies and revive benevolent energies from the heart and circulatory system. Mirrored in a reflexivity of the photographic image, the bodies of water and light in the hue of amber, create a visual translation of these material properties.

 

 

 

SOMME 2019

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

 

 

SOMME, film photography, 2019. Somme, is a place in France and a gruesome battle site. As a place of indeterminacy, with unnamed victors, the series creates a visual essay into understanding nature processes, often considered at once predictable and surprising. By attuning my senses to an ontological memory through a meditation process, the histories I felt within my body while moving through present day landscapes directed my attention to frame the aspects of the forest. In a hypnogogic state, sense experiences invited each exposure. As a vivid descriptions, the photographs visualise pain through landscape. Beauty and brutality, finite and unrelenting, memories are represented in visual chroma as windows to relentless changes in the ways life, seasons, and societies, build and fall.

 

 

MOUVEMENTS 2015 – 2018

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

  • Mouvements (Bevegelsene), 2015-2018, film photography, variable sizes

 

MOUVEMENTS (BEVEGELSENE), 2015-2018, photography, variable sizes. Exhibitions at Vérité and Akers Mek in Oslo, Norway, 100 x 140 cm, Epson Archival Ink, mounted on kapa.

 

The Mouvements series reveals nuanced details in digital imaging technology. The images are informed by tensions in oil and water. The materiality of digital imaging technology, distance in viewing, and surreal representations in water forms are highlighted by minuscule film grains amplified after film scanning. The epistemology of water or way we come to learn and understand what water, is an ongoing endeavour. To then know what we are doing with technology, requires extended looking. The way something appears can obfuscate and reveal our relationship to the looking. Oil and water become elemental allegory for technocratic times. As Umberto Eco writes in several books on late modernity, images are read and our connections and relations are realised as a malleable surfaces. The natural beauty of the water is transformed by a hypnotic colour palette tied to screen technology. Viewing distances engage viewers in a sense of movement in stillness.

 

Exhibition for Oslo Art & Fashion Festival at Vérité and afterwards at Akers Mek. The series is available for printing on metal, vinyl, for limited edition prints, custom facades for public art. The series is part of the book: Textures & Movements.