Light Leaks Variation No. 13 [0 x infinity: meditation on evolution], 1999 56 4x5" color Polaroids [Enlarge in New Window]

Erika Blumenfeld: Light Graphs

"Light has always been my fascination," Erika Blumenfeld says. "It is the tool with which I ask and answer my questions." Since the beginning of Western art, the function, spectacle, and phenomenon of light have rightly occupied the creative output of many visual artists. Some have been drawn by light's obvious connotations -- of purity, infinity, and the capturing of the spirit. Others have been fascinated by the science of light, using it to better render the world, like the 17^th century painter Johannes Vermeer, who employed the camera obscura technique to achieve visions of light in paint that had never been seen before, or the Impressionists, who fractured light into its component parts.

Erika Blumenfeld's fascination with light is not so much as metaphor or means to an end, but as pure medium. It is the phenomenon of light that is the subject of her photographic work.

Born in New Jersey in 1971, Blumenfeld started making art with light while in high school in Boston. Her first works, shot with a 35mm camera, were primarily nature studies, though even then it was the subjective property of light that intrigued the young artist, who tried to capture light's pure rhythm within a composition. Subsequently, she initiated Light Graphs in 1999, an ongoing work that represents her largest and most sustained effort thus far on the investigation of light. The project's duration shares more than passing similarities with the lengthy process of creating each object.

Blumenfeld begins like a photographer might, but that is the end of that comparison. She loads film into a Polaroid camera, but one that has been modified, having its glass lens removed. She then intentionally leaks light onto the film at regular intervals. The effect is a form of mapping that demonstrates gradations of light, from a pure monochromatic blue to a barely visible light hue. This emphatic gesture of process is the beginning of Blumenfeld's creative output. The process ends only when the final images are hung in grids on the wall or, as in her recent installation Light Graph: Reflection for a Muted Sky, placed directly on the floor.

Regarding the first installment of this series, presented at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in 2001, she says, "Light Graph: Winter Solstice 2000 is an impression of the light we experience over the course of the shortest day of the year. I took a two-second exposure every minute from dawn until dusk, then installed all 625 Polaroids in chronological order in a grid. When I finished installing the piece for the first time, I realized that I was able to visibly detect the trajectory of the sun with relation to our exact latitude/longitude while exposing the film. It was a complete surprise, but it made perfect sense."

In 2002, Blumenfeld will have shown the project abroad as part of a two-person exhibition in Mainz, Germany. The work has also been seen at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston.

While Blumenfeld's highly inventive strategies for making photographs are thoroughly of this moment, the physical structure of her finished pieces suggests an affinity with the early Minimalists. In particular, her display of grids and serial images bears resemblance to the work of such '60s painters and sculptors as Robert Ryman and Donald Judd. Yet Blumenfeld's interest in the grid goes beyond its use as a formal device, entering a realm of latent meaning that Judd and company would never have considered part of their work.

Unlike the Minimalists, Blumenfeld embraces the idea of spirituality in her light impressions. In fact, A Box of Eight, an early suite of eight relief prints on vellum, took the formal geometry of the I-Ching as its starting point, finding sustenance in a paradox that merges the spiritual and the scientific in equal doses. "The grid is a reference to sacred geometry and the rhythms inherent in nature," Blumenfeld explains. "It is order, but as no grid is entirely perfect, it is also chaos. I don't believe I am capturing light per se, but I do believe a visible essence of light remains on the film; what I call 'the intention of light.' It is an impression of the phenomenon we experience."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Photography | Environment | Southwest / Pacific | 2000