Elemental Forms: Landscapes by Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer

Issue 151

Elemental Forms: Landscapes consists of experimental tintype photograms that explore how observing Nature informs contemplation, perception, and identity, while reflecting on environmental concerns. The series is anchored in a deep connection to the landscape, fascination with the photo-based object, and daily walks in the redwood forest overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Rather than transcribing the observed landscape, I seek to record intuitive responses that speak to the felt and ineffable experience of being present in the landscape, by using a pared down visual vocabulary created with light, photo chemistry, cut paper, and paint brushes and cliché verre. Disorienting compositions, evidence of the hand, and process artifacts serve to undermine illusionistic references to physical locales while gesturing toward the hidden, the immaterial, the unphotographable.

I often incorporate shapes and artifacts that allude to the Anthropocene (e.g., city lights, colossal cargo ships scattered across the San Francisco Bay, polluted air, global warming-induced forest fires, etc.), to explore how ‘progress’ and its externalities relates to the notions of immanence (the idea that the divine is manifested in the material world), solastalgia (pain caused by environmental loss), and beauty (Keats’ concept of beauty as truth; beauty in all things).

Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer lives and works in Oakland, California.
www.nadezdanikolova.com