Continuing through April 30, 2016
Cutting into or physically manipulating photographs has become quite a trend in the art world, but artists do so with varying success. In “Photoobjects,” German photographer Christiane Feser has not only done something delightfully original, she has done so with astonishing élan. She creates geometric abstractions that tease the eye, that make you want to look longer and more deeply to understand what you are seeing. When you stand in front of “Partition 31,” you wonder if you are actually looking at a sea of open boxes mounted on the wall, with their openings pointed towards you — or are you looking at a photograph of a sea of boxes? In fact, Feser’s photographs are hybrids; they are both photography and sculpture.
She creates illusionistic dimensions by setting up and photographing real objects — boxes, strips of paper, geometric shapes — and then going that one better by cutting into the surface of the photographic print, lifting and folding back sections. The tab is bent in different directions, and sometimes another color is added behind the opening. It all contributes to the illusion of three dimensionality, of looking at actual boxes or geometric shapes. However, I think our mind grasps that something is awry, so there’s a tantalizing mystery to what we are seeing. The shadows, for example, can be confounding, as there are shadows thrown by the actual objects she photographed. Then there are the shadows created by the gallery’s lighting raking across the raised shapes. In the “Verwebung" series she weaves strips of paper together; in the “Lamellen" series the strips are creased and raised so as to slash the picture plane on the diagonal. While many of her works are monochromatic, Feser introduces background colors in the simple but elegantly composed “Sticks” series.
Published Courtesy of ArtSceneCal ©2016
