PLANAR STUDIES, 2015 – ongoing, are images relating to the way matter emerges from the background and looks at the visual field as a site of malleable tactility. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com
In Front of You, 2020-2022, triptych, photography, reveals layers of landscape and the ways focus reimages the forms that are there.
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Twilight Sheets, 2020-2022, Keeping flowers alive a little longer through early and late frosts, my parents would dress plants in worn bedsheets for protection. I worried the weight of the cotton would break the stems. Instead, the plants taught me their intelligence in bowing to accommodate the weight of protection. Dappled in twilight dew, the new application of the sheets I had seen for decades gave me pause. I long had an impulse to hug what I saw, rubbing against urges to cut roses fearing imminent death, here, too, I refrained from the action to embrace. In a limbic pause, the sense of longing to be touched, embraced, and be protected, pushed me a few steps back to look again. I gazed in the tearful gratitude of the sweetness of such a gesture, I studied the sheetfold’s congregations as congruent with my appreciation for lines formed through centuries in rocks. The patterns of the bedding mimicked the very plants covered. The desire to protect what is with another form of that, the draping of the flowers with flowered textiles performs the artists’ impulse to express love through performative representation. While sentiments are oft-loathed in the contemporary art world and often suspect by ‘society’, I hid these photos from view for a while. Occasionally reviewing the images to resuscitate their significance, I decided recently to share them on the internet to remind myself to make prints, draw them, or perhaps paint, but why? Such a saccharine clinging to ineffable moments illuminates this place behind my nose, animating a memory of the scent of bedclothes and damp plants. While the experience becomes delivered to the present, the longing to look back or again, just a little longer, lets the love for what is blossoming open up a bit more. In looking, fights and hunger are forgotten. I forget anything other than these sorts of illuminated, parietal pleasures. These spaces within our bodies are invisible to the world and evident in our gestures. I invite longer lingering on these generous actions of care as nurturing to focus on our collective psyches. If psyche means spirit or at least the psyche dances with spirit, then perhaps the effect of art has greater weight and stake in the longevity of our being here. Since difficulty is made in attempting to light a protected and damp plant on fire, perhaps putting out the fire in the minds of men would invite the delivery of care people are aching and crying for.
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Landscape Psychologies, 2015 -2020, medium format film, exposed in the Jotunheimen National Park, digital manipulation of scans enhances the transferring process from analogue to digital. In the time of excessive screen interfaces, the work is made to understand what is happening to viewers and their perception of landscapes. The work invites viewers to contemplate their personal relationship with interiority and landscape.
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FORMATIONS, 2015, photography.
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Interior Lights, 2009-2012, giclée. Analogue film, ltd. editions of 8. Sizes vary.
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Liminal Metanoia, 2009-2010, c-prints. A limited edition of images were printed and collected by private individuals. Click this text to view the exhibition in Georgia.
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Interspace, 2008 – 2009, photography. 25.4 x 15.24cm (10 x 6in). Selected images published in Neo New Age zine, 2012, Chicago.
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