Vendredi 06 Mai 2016 11:25:14 par Nour Alahiane-lechevalier dans Expositions

Elizabeth Opalenik lives and works in Oakland, California, but this peripatetic artist is always on the move. For the Pennsylvania farm girl, a two-week photography workshop in Maine over 30 years ago transformed her life. Traveling to study and pursue her art, she landed in the south of France, where she learned the technique of mordançage from its inventor, Jean-Pierre Sudre. As a photographic artist, Elizabeth was mesmerized by images made in water from the beginning of her career.

© Elizabeth Opalenik

Elizabeth tells us of her work:

For 35 years I have been drawn to photographing the human form in water. Like many things in life, one must learn how to see what isn't there to know how to see what really is there at a more sophisticated level.

In the series Reflections on the Edge, Elizabeth captures the human form in the ever-changing reflective properties of water. Through her lens she see wonderfully distorted robust figures and colorful patterns that remind her of the works of Fernando Botero and Gustav Klimt. Every minute, every cloud, the wind and the movement of the model disturb the water and distort the image; thus her palette is continually reanimated. The forms created by light and shadow, wind and wave alter the boundaries between reality and fancy, illusion and distortion, appearance and misperception. The prints in this collection are further accentuated by printing the images on handmade Japanese paper.

© Elizabeth Opalenik

On the other hand, in the series Altered Egos, the constantly changing refractive qualities of light--the bending wave of light as it passes between two media of different densities, first air and then water--creates an optical effect that distorts Elizabeth's subject. In some instances, the distortion can enhance the beauty of the model, and in others the distortion can be a malformed and misshapen body or face so as to be seen as unnatural and strange. Unlike the Reflections series, these Ego images challenge the notion that art must realistically depict the human form even when some images are haunting distortions and skewed perspectives. Realism is abandoned--Elizabeth doesn't want the reproduction to be an exact representation of the person portrayed, photographic in detail to detail. Rather, she is looking to capture a "nonrepresentational," a "nonobjective" abstraction of her model. Conceptually, she looks for the expressive elements of the realist's art by modifying the natural appearance rather than reproducing the image exactly as her model looks in real life.