 |
|
|
 |
Landfills |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Math & Nature Portfolio (Doren/Paas Collaboration) |
|
The Math & Nature Portfolio is a collaboration between Mariah Doren and Johanna Paas. The work presents a search to uncover relationships between structure and nature. It explores the tension between order that is innate and that which is imposed. We use mathematical equations as a kind of parameter setting, or rules, that serve as a way to externalize the concepts that underpin the work. The sensibility of our inquiry engages the process of collaboration itself. The results are layered, mixed media, overlapping images. The images combine photography and printmaking, ink jet prints, Van Dyke Browns, intaglio, silkscreen, relief, paint, wax and sew.
Pi (π): infinite, constant yet irrational, perfection.
Cosine: inverse relationships, the finding of self in relation to
other, opposite yet codependent.
Natural log (ln): explosive growth or decay, how one thing
builds upon itself.
The mathematical constant (e): transcendent and uncountable,
maps and measures distance.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Landfills |
|
This series of images starts with photographs of the landscape of landfills. They then re-assemble and re-imagine what might lay beneath.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Fasle Diptych Series |
|
The False Diptych Series is a comparison of landscapes but is also a theoretical project where the role of the observer is posited against our received notions of landscape. The compositions pair seemingly continuous views of the same constructed landscape, usually golf courses, which are actually images from different locations. The photographs are paired as a diptych that seems like one picture cut in half. The relationships between the objects in the images, and relationships between the separate pieces themselves, are central and carefully constructed. I use formal aspects, light, angle of view and horizon lines to bind one half-image to the other. They are superficially a pair: two pictures, one scene.Photographing constructed landscapes is an integral part of my work. The ideal of the natural is elusive and the legibility and clear geometry of constructed places seems more “perfect” than pristine nature itself. I use the palladium process to allude to 19th century Pictorialism, a romantic period of image making, that further pushing the artifice of the compositions
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Current Projects |
|
My current work plays with two themes from earlier projects: The idea of the constructed landscape and multilayered images built through mixed media prints. The location, place or moment described is visually constructed using fragments of photographs, drawings or printed material. These images push the idea of construction in a different direction. The preciousness of specific moments, artificially inserted is singled out with the addition of a picket fence for a single tree or a vase for a curved sapling. Fragments are purposefully discontinuous or grotesquely out of scale so the connections that bind the image rely on fantasy, dreams or personal association. At the same time the surface of these images are lush: palladium prints, waxed, sewn, painted or printed upon. While most are clearly divided in halves there are layers with varying transparency, weight and use of space.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Build-A-Park Series |
|
The Build-a-Park Series extends from the comparison of landscapes. The compositions combine three seemingly continuous views of the same constructed landscape, but are photographs of golf courses in different locations. The reference in this series to 19th Century Romantic landscape design is more direct, using Frederick Law Olmstead’s vision of ideal progress through a park—start with a meadow, then move into the ramble and end with a water view.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Gowanus Canal Series |
|
The Gowanus Canal Series is a collection of images that describe a canal in Brooklyn near where I live. Walking through the neighborhood I made these images as I reflected on the rich history of a now derelict industrial waterway. Oysters from the canal were one of Brooklyn’s earliest exports to Europe, and today it must be on the top ten list of most polluted bodies of water in the United States. The water, which I have never touched, has been described as being like black mayonnaise.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
