FLEURESSENCE, 2014-2022, digitally manipulated photography, sizes vary. The portraits of forest landscapes are cast in a UV spectrum often used in forensics and medical imaging. To look at the way different creatures experience life, the images were made based on an interest in understanding formation of life in relationship to light. The type of light, in perceivable pigment and forms, invite considerations on being and becoming. The emergence of memory through biological processes joins the process of imagining the ways humans, animals, or robots may remember a landscape. The aesthetic phosphorescence in the terrain-scapes posit a depiction of sensory perceptions inviting viewers into a sublime visual memory of a bodied relationship with nature. The original images were made at Starved Rock State Park in Illinois, a historical battle site between settlers and natives. While this story is not obvious in the final images, the nascent knowledge of a memory imposed upon a landscape is looked at through the series. Often mitigated by illuminated screens, the images in the Fleuressence series invites viewers into considering the embodied experience in visual material. In other words, that which appears one way, is not as it seems but may invite deeper consideration of the role our ideas and motivations impact the environment around us.
Fleuressence is part of a larger body of works called: Virtual Material including GIF/Mp4 Transitions/Movements made for prints, videos, installations, projections, use in performances. These terrain-scapes are proposed as woven images, connected by threads to each layer of imagery. As part of the larger body of work: Virtual Material exploits several aspects of photography while engaging in multiplicity of subjects including water, stones, forests, technology, vision, body, perception, ethics, joy and care. Virtual Material works include: Mouvements, Teknovisuell Experience, Sonidos, Ultraviolet Forest, and a number of videos and installation artworks as prints, projections, wall coverings, acrylic prints, garments.
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Bora, 2019, 04:49 minutes, single channel video, a techologised colour spectrum forest with music evocative of commerce videos. Informed by Nancy Holt and Richard Serra’s Boomerang video. Within critiques of contemporary media can curiosity and sincerity in the natural world be invigorated or transferred through digital media? In which aspects of perception does visual phenomena transform to inspiration or cynicism? Can the spectrum of colour and the knowledge of magenta cast being of the mind, revert the mental aspect of the image of natural phenomena closer to the idea or does it become hyperreal and further from the real? The video is part of Virtual Material body of work, intended for exhibition adjacent to Ultraviolet Forest. This video and those found on this website are included in the Videokunstarkivet, administered by the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, Norway. Special thanks to Atelier Nord. Contact: mariammanart@icloud.com to arrange for exhibitions or screenings of the film. (The video here is presented at low-resolution).
