Captured Nature:
Captured Nature
An exhibition put together in collaboration with Fiber artist, Elise Adamson, to create a multi-media experience exploring the nature of memory.
Project Brief:
PUBLISHED:
Sep 2024
Project Team:
Matt Vogel
Elise Adamson
The feeling of the natural world can only be reflected through fragments rather than its entirety. Just as a camera can only focus on one part of an experience, memory seems to tell a true story but often does not reflect reality. In Captured Nature we transform photographs to reveal how the beauty of our natural world can only be replicated through fragmented perspectives.
Capturing nature through film photography, the imagery follows manicured greenhouses, naturally reclaimed scenery, and solitary benches. These film photos are implemented through silkscreen printing onto paper, fabric, and resists on intaglio copper plates. The paper provides structure and tangibility, contrasting the breathable and lively qualities of silk organza fabric.
Captured Nature displays lessons from the interaction of the natural and human world to pose the question: How can a memory or experience truly be communicated to others, or even to oneself, when mood and circumstances constantly shift their frame of mind?
This set of prints depicting three different benches doubles as a haiku that explores how we interact with our memories of the past, formation of memories in the present, and the impact of these memories in the future.
"Taking It All In" opens the scenery haiku with one seaside bench facing the Pacific Ocean. It serves as a moment of reflection on one's past.
"While Sitting in Solitude" captures a swing bench on a snowy winter day in the woods. It holds a balance point between holding to our past or moving towards our future. It represents this ever going decision making that takes place in our present lives.
"A Moment to Breathe" end the haiku with the most human-touched loaction of the three bench series. It's warm greenhouse interior serves as a reminder to breathe and let go of the anxieties of the past and present and to look forward to what may start anew.
Taking It All In
While Sitting In Solitude
A Moment To Breathe
Capturing Nature
The similarly titled artist book "Capturing Nature" catalogues photographs from Georgia and California in copper etchings. These collected scenes hold memories both known and unknown to us the artists. They depict how human experiences leave marks on the natural world that prove the ephemeral nature of our memories.
Always Changing and hanging on the edge
This set of two multimedia prints explores the relationship between human emotion and its effect on our shifting memories.
"Always Changing" reflects on the human experience of undergoing change through metaphors connected to nature. It is often only after something or someone undergoes a change that we can see things from a differing perspective in hindsight. It is also through witnessing this process of change that can influence our own complex perspectives.
"Hanging on the Edge" related the precarious nature of greenhouse planters to civilization itself. It is humanity's volatile emotions that keep a society at a perpetual tipping point between progress and demise. If it fallts to the latter, society's fragile collective memory can be altered as well.
Stationary & Printed Materials
Other usages of the brand system include physically cut out "O"s seen in the museum guidebook, and unique hand lettering or folk artwork on merchandise such as tote bags.
This overlaid trio brings back the nostalgia of a left-behind home to new experiences near the in the same locations at later points in time.
"Full Life" renders the redwood forests of Northern California with a memory of joy and exploration. Its full color is cherished fondly as the tree forms take shape.
"Breaking Through" is the second California work in fabric over sepia halftoned ink. The succulants that failed to be cultivated will thrive by breaking through old concrete.
"Held Close" is set in an old location but in a new experience. As much as the past can be idealized, new memories can be tended to.
Full Life
Breaking Through
Held Close
