Wanda Boudreaux
"Tree Series"
September 13 -October 6, 2012
Reception Thursday September 13, 7-9pm
The artwork of Wanda Boudreaux has always been about calling attention to and celebrating the Spirit of Nature. She makes art about the dichotomy of our physical world and a mysterious spiritual reality that speaks easily through nature, the landscape and the seascape.
The natural environs of the urban places where she has lived: New Orleans, New York and Los Angeles, have been her inspiration. Her fascination with the way that trees in Los Angeles are often times very closely cropped has informed much of the current focus of the work. Boudreaux sees them as natural elements that are also man-made, and very figurative. Many urban trees survive, just as humans do, and adapt to less than ideal circumstances. More often than not, they maintain their intrinsic beauty and live up to their innate responsibility: to sustain life.
These photographs are portraits of some of the affected trees that she has come across during her daily excursions where she lives. Describing them in her words: "I think of them as friends, and wonder at their ability to continue to live and adapt and be infused with a beautiful life spirit. I honor them as totems rich with visual imagery and metamorphic meaning that harkens to a most profound condition—mutual survival of people and trees into a healthy future."
As a painter who loves photography, taking photographs started out as a way for the artist to create reference materials for paintings. The prints here are made from digitally manipulated Polaroid photographs. While the immediacy of instant photography is most appealing, she is often compelled to leave the tangible handmade mark by drawing and painting on the photographic prints allowing her to veer into the fresh territory of hybrid creations.
In the work of Wanda Boudreux we find a balance of analog and digital, of handmade and technological in a striking formal harmony. As well, we can observe a clear and urgent visual poetry pointing the way to an ecological harmony between humans and our natural habitat.
