visible images of the invisible....

Wendy Stefansson. Untitled 4-1. Light leak photo, 2004.

In this untitled series, I am playing with boundaries.  I am making photos that border on paintings; paintings with the medium of film.  

I am deconstructing the idea of a photograph to its most fundamental components: light and film.  By the careful manipulation or random destruction of the film casing, I am allowing light to play across unexposed film, creating surprising effects, sometimes reminiscent of fire or the northern lights.   I am creating “photos” without a camera or lens.  I am creating abstract, colour-field “paintings” with a medium remarkable for its ability to render “reality”.  I am capturing the unknown, the Unknowable, in a medium ostensibly used to define what is known.  I am making visible images of the Invisible.  

I have learned that these works need to be untitled because they were created without intentionality, by means of play and wonder and a large element of chance. Naming these images might be a creative act in its own right, but it is also like finding shapes in the clouds. What you see is as valid as what I see.  Everyone must name his or her own god(s).

Increasingly the art objects that I make function as the public documentation of private experiences or events.  Each work is like a brushstroke or gesture; a record of my movements, my life as it is lived.  Some of the works in this series were created by my dancing on top of the films; the patterns of light entering the film were created by the dance.  The images are silent witnesses to an otherwise unwitnessed performance.

2005

Wendy Stefansson. Untitled 5-1. Light leak photo, 2004.

Wendy Stefansson. Untitled 10-4. Light leak photo, 2004.

Wendy Stefansson. Untitled 11-4. Light leak photo, 2004.

Wendy Stefansson. Untitled 20-1. Light leak photo, 2004.

Wendy Stefansson. Untitled 21-1. Light leak photo, 2005.

To see another of my light leak photos, see my post entitled "love is blindness" -- http://inno-particular-order.blogspot.ca/2014/01/love-is-blindness.html.

the beautiful void....

Anish Kapoor. Untitled. Alabaster. 2003.

The beautiful void. The absence. The place where the sphere, the orb, the pearl might once have been. Where now there is space and light. Where now there is only lustre.

Laura Deakin. Dishonest Pearls. Synthetic pearl lustre and polyester resin. 2007

Laura Deakin. Dishonest Pearls. 2007

Laura Deakin. Dishonest Pearls. 2008.

folds

Jeannine Marchand. Continencia (detail). Folded white clay.

Clay folded like whipped cream

or white icing, 

or the memory of the night 

left in the bed sheets 

in the white light of morning.

Jeannine Marchand. Untitled (detail). Folded white clay.