A SENSE OF DEPARTURE

As a photo-based artist, I am deeply interested in questioning forms of visual representation. Through my work I seek to address the ways in which we experience and interpret what we see; how we encounter, read, construct, classify, categorize and evaluate our visual world.

The photo-sculptures, created in 2004 & 2005, re-configure the framework and conditions in which the photographic image is normally perceived. Here the ‘photograph’ is no longer a flat representation or a ‘window onto the world’ but rather a three-dimensional sculpture. Standing before these ‘photographs’ we are confronted with the materiality of the photographic image as it becomes the object’s skin, a delicate and impermanent surface wrapping around space. The photo-sculptures, displayed as stand-alone objects, are alternately represented in the form of photographic light boxes. Their simultaneous presence raises the difficult question of the nature or essence of the photographic image itself.

My attraction to those physically manipulated sculptural forms subsequently caused me to abandon the photographic image entirely. Working with blank canvas, these forms began to take over my studio, and grew into undulating landscapes. In these topographies, the moods of peaks and valleys which shifted as the light changed—brought me to appreciate anew and want to capture and fix in time—as a two-dimensional representation—that which was fleeting and impermanent.

In retrospect, this process has compelled me to return to explore the evocative power and poetics of the photographic medium—the language of light and shadow, depth of field, framing, timing, and vantage point. 

- Susana Reisman, 2007

SUSANA REISMAN is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology (MFA), who now lives in Toronto, Ontario. Born and raised in Venezuela, Reisman’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Canada, including solo exhibitions at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and at the University of Rochester as well as numerous group exhibitions including ones at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, MA., the Eastern Front Gallery in Toronto, and the Synapse Gallery and Center for Photography in Benton Harbor, MI. She has been a guest speaker at the 2006 Society for Photographic Education national conference in Chicago, IL. and participated in DIALOGUE: art.technology.imagery as a panelist at the 2004 SPE Mid-Atlantic Conference in Laurel, MD. Her work was featured in the anthology, Alphabet City: Trash, published by MIT Press in fall 2006. 

For more information about Reisman visit her website at www.susanareisman.com.
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