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Change is the Constant is a photographic series of water images unlike typical waterside scenes. These images are reflections of surrounding landscapes: city, country, suburban, rural — although precise location or setting can never be quite determined — captured in the fractions of time they grace the watery plain.
Water, it's availability, potability and sustainability, is a global crisis threatening the entire human race. It reaches across ethnicity, cultures, economics, and military strength. There is no other substance on the planet as malleable: it freezes, flows, condenses, evaporates, stagnates. It elicits meditation and catastrophe. This series encourages its viewers to see water differently — to appreciate it’s changeablility and adaptability in view of society’s critical need to modify it’s own use and management of this fragile resource. _______________________________________ When Photographs Become Paintings Photographer Cheryl Nemazie works real wonders with her pictures, which, along with their references to water, have the density of color and nonobjectivity associated with abstract paintings. In the early stages of photography, most practitioners were concerned with the image as it related to traditional painting—hence the pictorialism of the iconic 1904 work by Edward Steichen, The Pond—Moonlight. But later on, in the early middle of the 20th century, some American photographers turned to more abstract images, following the accomplishments and explorations of abstract painters. To this day, photographic artists continue to contribute to the now-established genre of abstract photography, and Nemazie belongs to this group to some extent. Her project, entitled Change Is the Constant, is based on patterns of water; they look both like naturalistic studies and highly original nonpictorial paintings. In many cases, her art seems to begin where figuration leaves off, marking that boundary in highly original ways. The changes she makes to the image are simple, following traditional photographic techniques. But in response to Nemazie’s creativity, her audience looks at nature differently, with an eye for its nonrepresentational features, caught in the artist’s work by her willingness to take risks with the composition. The abstract elements inherent in Nemazie’s vision are tied to water, its endlessly reflective surface, but the photos go much further, toward a visual independence in their highly expressive treatment of the most abundant of the elements. As Nemazie has pointed out in an artist’s statement, water is becoming a global political concern, in terms of availability, sustainability, and potability. But her geopolitical concerns do not lessen water’s sensuousness and intense pictorialism in her hands; indeed, her imagery lends itself to lyric transformations that essentialize water as a material and at times nearly transform it into a purely abstract expression. Photography, one of the most powerful images in the collection, concerns the play of light on an expanse of water; the white cursives and rounded strokes of light contrast beautifully with the dark blue of the right half of the picture and seem to dance directly on the water’s surface to the left. There is as well a striking connection being made between recognizable and abstract images: the light is gorgeous but hard to identify beyond its sinuous patterns, and the water, illumined by the light, seems to swell and curve the way it does in the ocean at night, where its nature is almost indistinguishable from darkness. At the same time, the work comments on light, the medium through which photography is brought about. Nemazie’s open approach to photography leads her to challenges and experiments that align with other kinds of art—painting in particular. Her compositional sense is notably sophisticated, so that the images hang together in a way that reflects the legacy of picture-making as well as photography. Decibels, a highly painterly image, leans toward synesthesia; sound appears to be measured by the tan and brown horizontal lines that comprise two-thirds of the right side of the composition. Already we are edging into an abstract calculation—the quantification of sound—but Nemazie keeps close to her original interest, the depiction of water, too. The left third of the composition is composed of blues and blacks that offer a peaceful vision of water at rest. It contrasts sharply with the earthen colors on the right, so that a disconnect occurs between the two volumetric spaces of Decibels. This clash of colors adds significant interest to the photo, whose weightedness as an image clearly can be ascribed to a painting as much as to a photograph. By straddling mediums, Nemazie reminds us of the still-appreciated relations between photography and painting, no matter its long-ago divergence of motives and motifs. The great thing about art is its self-sufficiency, its willingness to be what it is despite the big theories and cutting criticisms that prove obstacles to its appreciation. Nemazie knows that her art is meant to give pleasure in addition to proving that often the distance between figuration and abstraction is not as great as it seems. The artist has spent time in Venice, surely one of the world’s great centers of historical paintings; Venetian Breeze consists of an abstract reflection of water, with roiling shapes and twists and turns that are dark brown on the left edge of the image and tan, orange, and red in the middle third. On the right is the recognizable light blue and white of water, but here too the identification reaches beyond what is easily read. It could easily be a photo of the sky with traces of clouds. Venetian Breeze plays off our expectations of art and nature in highly creative ways; another Venetian image, Incandescent, beautifully sums up the stunning color and light found in the city’s canals. The picture, taken at day’s end, amounts to an impressionist vision of water with bands of light in orange, yellow, red, and green stretching across the width of water, brilliantly silver as it catches the last light. Incandescent is a photograph that has become a painting, with small effects of luminescence that linger in the vision of Nemazie’s viewers. One thinks of the old photography that looked to painting for guidance, but here the image at once looks back and forges ahead—to a merger that is courageously new. When a photograph becomes a painting, most of us are inclined to see the transformation as retrograde—lacking in a forward understanding of art. But Incandescent, like most of Nemazie’s art, is something else: a treatment of possibilities that grips new ways of seeing pictures perform mergers that add to our current possibilities of art. In the artist’s hands, this is no small achievement. Jonathan Goodman is an art writer and editor who has published extensively on modern and contemporary art for such publications as Art in America, Sculpture, Art Asia Pacific, Art on Paper, and Artcritical. He has written extensively on Asian art for several publications, and has written exhibition catalogues for art venues throughout the world. |
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