Sunday, April 01, 2007

MARSHA VDOVIN: PHOTOGRAPHS

As always, clicking on an image will open a larger version in a new window.

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Marsha Vdovin writes: "I am a child of modernism. I embrace the clean lines, the simplicity and the minimalism. I bask in abstraction and clarity of form. I salute Neutra and Schindler, Eames, Malevich, Rodchenko, Delaunay, Rothko, Stella and Punk Rock, Punk Rock, Punk Rock.

My photography is about my lifelong obsession with abstract painting. It is about line, color, texture, form and composition. I began to paint my own paintings in order to photograph them and the paintings sometimes end up having a life of their own. There is so much available material in my immediate life. Texture has been a huge interest for me as graphical elements – where lines intersect – and color of course becomes a major player. I have resisted extensive photoshop manipulation and what you see is what I see in the viewfinder."

What I like about Marsha's photographs is their immanence, their insistence that the entire universe is contained in every minute partial view. A single view of raindrops on an automobile becomes for me an afternoon spent in a movie theater watching a film adaptation of a novel by, possibly, James M. Cain. And my experience of the photo also encompasses the reading of that novel, and my post-movie dinner, seated alone in a booth in a 24-hour diner where main street crosses the old highway. These photos tap deep into my filmic imagination without being, themselves, particularly filmic.

When I was a small child & had superb eyesight, my imagination was continuously sparked by all the details & textures of my surroundings: shadows, lint, plaster, pebbles, all the myriad patterns & random arrangements of the walls, floors, rooms, conveyances, environments around me. Taller now, more jaded, distracted, and with much poorer eyesight, I sometimes feel as though I am moving like a zombie through a world that no longer speaks to me.

Many of Marsha's photos once again bring me close enough to surfaces so that I suffer (enjoy) a synesthesia that ignites a proliferation of referential sensations & filmic memories. What I like about those that do not bring me close to a distinct surface is that they refuse to resolve into any surface at all, but do so suggestively, and shimmer with mysterious lights like Boulevard Saint-Michel in the rain after seeing Fellini Roma.

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