Claire Desalme: Escapes

While depicting nature through photographic form is a raging challenge, this body of work rose to that and I believe successfully conquered my own bias and baggage surrounding this heavily historied photographic genre. I don't think of nature when I look at it, it has transcended that frame and pushed me into another, a place that could surround me with its calm color palette and unnerve me with its own point of view. The positioning of the horizon line borders on unsettling, and I question if I could possibly go there or if I am stuck, a wanderer who never reaches a destination. These ideas of place, certainty, and direction (be it specific or ambiguous) are crucial in this work. But others have been there before me, I look at what they left behind, or what it left behind-- there is the knowledge of the other. Perhaps they were as lost as I am, and yet I begin to believe this way of being lost is a mere term, neither negative or positive... it just is. I enter into this expanse of landmarks and they are a tribute to different states of being, to emotional states, to subconscious states, they are an image of the resting place.

Congrats!

xoxo,

Charlie