The Capriccio Foundation For Modern and Contemporary Art opens “Elegy” a new series of photographic works by Santa Fe artist Deborah Samuel at Capriccio’s 333 Montezuma exhibition space in the Railyard. The opening reception will be Friday September 7 th from 5-7PM. The public is invited. The exhibition dates are September 7th-December 15th, 2012.
Deborah Samuel has created with “Elegy” a body of work that is hauntingly beautiful in its stark simplicity. The work pares modernist photography literally to the bone. It embraces the Brancusi ideal of pure form, of image refined to its essence. Samuel’s work revolves around a meditation on the cycles of life and the forms of nature stripped of illusion, and in the case of “Elegy”, stripped to the very quick. There is an intensity in her approach to these forms that is best described by the opening lines of one of her favorite poems:
“The Song of Wandering Angus” by Yeats,
“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head
This fire is manifest in superb and masterful prints. Samuel’s demand for formal perfection, produces, in Elegy, a clinical precision that carries a silent scream, “formulated, sprawling on a pin”. It is a body of work that makes one think of Francis Bacon, Edward Weston and T.S. Eliot in the same image.
Deborah Samuel describes her process. “In producing Elegy, I fully embraced all aspects of the digital realm. I chose the scanner to replace the camera in capturing these images. With this choice I took an enormous leap into the digital realm. I had to work backwards from the old-school film fixed negative image. I used the available depth of field with the fixed scanner and positioned the objects to determine what and where the focus was to be. It was a painstaking trial and error process but the results speak for themselves.”
Deborah Samuel uses the skeletal structure of various animals, as Edward Weston used the shell, to expose the pure abstract formal beauty of animals living wild in nature. There is an x-ray quality to the work in “Elegy” that looks deeper than skin and even bone to reach some level of the mythical. In “Armadillo VI” the grey and black scale is so superb that the image has the feel of a silver jewelry artifact from some lost culture more ancient than the Egyptian, more mysterious than the known cultures of Mezzo-America. The high technological gaze reveals a form that is as pure as the earliest cave paintings, both beautiful and violent.
One of the tenants of early modernism was that more “primitive” and less decadent cultures saw further into the deep mysteries of life through their direct contact with nature through ritual and myth.
In “Barred Owl”, there is an insight into the origin of the mask. Tribal hunter/gatherers were the existent cultures for most all of human history. Tribal cultures are the most intense observers of animals and the cycles of life because for hunters, life and death are always in the balance in the deadly dance for survival. Looking at “Barred Owl” we see observation so intense and a “mask” so powerful that it gives hints to the place and origin of the mask.
In “Owl ll” Samuel gives us a haunting portrait that is as beautiful and dramatic as the great European portraits of Kings and Cardinals. It carries the scream of Munch and Bacon in its perfect depth of field. It could be a portrait of Charon, the ferryman who plied the river Styx. This combination of technical mastery and mystical image is a defining characteristic of Deborah Samuel’s work.
