Category: Images

MANGANESE 2019

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

“Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.” -Rumi

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.

As Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just, Beauty offers experiences leading to resolutions of inner turmoil. The balance of energy, motivation, and resources for a tree to grow also follows in traditions of seekers and sages of wisdom. 

The series is represented by Albumen Gallery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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. These material properties are mirrored in the reflexivity of photographic images.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SURREAL LANDSCAPE

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

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.

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

 

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.

SOMME 2019

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

SOMME, film photography, 2019, sizes variable.

Somme is a place in France of a gruesome battle, noted for unnamed victors. Without clear winners, a site of indeterminacy offers a series of visual metaphors into the process of understanding nature. By attuning the senses to an ontological memory, the histories of a place can be felt through they body. The framing action in the apparatus of photography invites hypnogogic viewing of the elementals within nature. As virtual impressions (images), the photographs visualise spectrums of feeling through landscape forms. Beauty and brutality, finite and unrelenting, pain and reprieve, are represented in as chromatic windows into relentless changes in the ways life, seasons, and societies, build and fall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MOUVEMENTS 2015 – 2018

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

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 artwork became part of a develop of garment designs and is part of the book: Textures & Movements.

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

RUISSEAU (HOLOCENE) 2018

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

RUISSEAU (HOLOCENE), 2018, film photography, 68,14 x 101,6 cm (26,8 x 40 in). Ruisseau Holocene is a reflection on how we perceive time and nature. The residue deposited over time in the sands of the Lofoten islands, in the North of Norway, creates endless streams of changing formations. 

The series is represented by Albumen Gallery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SENTIRE (GROW) 2017

Posted on by Rachel Wolfe

SENTIRE (GROW), 2017, film photography. Artist note; while I cannot ingest the plant in any capacity, I approach this series with curiosity. There was so much wonder on many levels; the actual labor involved in modern growing practices is full of technology, offering the grower refined nuance in selecting the biological expressions and usage effects. I had often wondered on all the terrible things humans are capable of, why a plant rendering the user inert (in a sense) to the external world, but (as I understand) somehow more in touch with the interior connection with the natural world, could have been criminalised. The decriminalisation of this plant is viewed as a triumph for many people and places, yet has remained a taboo subject and remains illegal in Norway. Photographing these plants led to developing a Poisonous Plants concept over several years; more on a different page, later. For usage rights and permissions contact: rachel@rachelwolfe.com