:: AIB MFA Alumni

Jeri Eisenberg | Fall 2005

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I feel no need to seek out grand vistas or exotic locales, majestic mountain ranges or rushing rivers. It's the common wooded landscape of my day to day life that captures my attention. Many of the images in my current work are from areas close to my home; others are from farther flung places, but places that I just happen to be for one prosaic reason or another. They are places that are generally more ordinary than spectacular.

By photographing the treed landscape with a purposefully over-sized pinhole or a radically defocused lens, however, I capture it as it is not often seen. The images are firmly grounded in the natural world, a particular place, a particular season, a particular time. But by obscuring detail, only the strongest brush strokes emerge: the images become sketches with light, literally and figuratively. They tend to float between there and not there, to dissolve into abstraction and reconfigure themselves back into recognizable form.

I began this series when my father, then 83, started loosing both his sight and his memory. Strangely, the work has been comforting. Beauty, though fleeting and fragmentary, seems to console me.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION