Tell Me Again, the World Will Be Beautiful
For the viewer, I hope these artworks together recall an abundance of sights seen, held dear, and linked by recollection -- scenes gathered through binoculars and focused eye, from shore and balcony, beyond the fence and within one’s garden.
This work is about longing for the wild, and about locating ourselves in the natural world. It’s built on a shared human compulsion to catalog wonder for present pleasure and future citation.
I think of my art as a call to inactive action: an encitement to sit, to see, to acknowledge the accumulation of sensory experience, and to reminisce.
Pervading the work is a willful celebration of small beauty and its pursuit. In our consumer culture of throw-away imagery, environmental anxieties, financial turmoil, and unsettling political discourse, the delight in feral beauty, for me, is essential to living life amidst the manmade.
My process has evolved to be much like that of a birdwatcher in the field; disciplined by skill, attuned to sight, and gifted by chance. But my purpose is to render the reality of the mind’s eye rather than the truth of the eye. My images begin with a lens, but are realized through the properties of printing process. Each unique picture is crafted with photographic chemistries, light, and hand work. I mix my photographic solutions from basic compounds, brushing them on handmade and fine papers to produce light-sensitive surfaces on which negatives are exposed. The final images, with velvety surfaces inherent to the van dyke and cyanotype methods and intensified with wax, are more like drawings than photographs, more like memories than documents.
In examining the roots of my infatuation with the natural world and with basic chemistry itself, I realized I owe much to a sterling undergraduate education in the writings of British Romantic poets, and eighteenth and nineteenth century English and French social history. A number of my titles are drawn from William Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey, which lays out a rich detailing of landscape and the transcendence of recollection. Other titles come either from Charles Wright’s book of poems A Short History of the Shadow, or from my imagination.
Alyssa C. Salomon
Providence Forge VA
This work is about longing for the wild, and about locating ourselves in the natural world. It’s built on a shared human compulsion to catalog wonder for present pleasure and future citation.
I think of my art as a call to inactive action: an encitement to sit, to see, to acknowledge the accumulation of sensory experience, and to reminisce.
Pervading the work is a willful celebration of small beauty and its pursuit. In our consumer culture of throw-away imagery, environmental anxieties, financial turmoil, and unsettling political discourse, the delight in feral beauty, for me, is essential to living life amidst the manmade.
My process has evolved to be much like that of a birdwatcher in the field; disciplined by skill, attuned to sight, and gifted by chance. But my purpose is to render the reality of the mind’s eye rather than the truth of the eye. My images begin with a lens, but are realized through the properties of printing process. Each unique picture is crafted with photographic chemistries, light, and hand work. I mix my photographic solutions from basic compounds, brushing them on handmade and fine papers to produce light-sensitive surfaces on which negatives are exposed. The final images, with velvety surfaces inherent to the van dyke and cyanotype methods and intensified with wax, are more like drawings than photographs, more like memories than documents.
In examining the roots of my infatuation with the natural world and with basic chemistry itself, I realized I owe much to a sterling undergraduate education in the writings of British Romantic poets, and eighteenth and nineteenth century English and French social history. A number of my titles are drawn from William Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey, which lays out a rich detailing of landscape and the transcendence of recollection. Other titles come either from Charles Wright’s book of poems A Short History of the Shadow, or from my imagination.
Alyssa C. Salomon
Providence Forge VA
