Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/513510
L Linda Girvin's art is based in photography, but she doesn't use a cam- era. When she tells people about her work, they'll often start with technical jargon, and she'll have to divulge that she doesn't know what they're talking about. "I have a Nikon film camera that I've had since the '70s," she says. "When I did use a camera, I liked to use it as simply as possible. I never metered or focused; it was just an extension of my hand." Considering she started the photography program at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, her reticence for the medium today may seem like a dis- connect for some, but she says that the lens got in the way. "Photographers are the observer," she says. "I'm a participant in these photographs." By these, she's referring to the pieces in her most recent series, "Presence With Absence," which, she says, represents a strict departure from the work she produced earlier in her career. "I'm in a differ- ent head space," she says. "I think it's a totally separate body of work, and people seem to feel it's my most resolved work yet." The striated shapes of the new series have a Richter-scale feel with Rorschach-test bursts of color. And while Girvin, 68, has had a nearly four-decade career, her latest work signifies the emergence of a new pro- cess and, symbolically, a new artist. In "Presence With Absence," she wants the audience to suspend rational thought and to absorb the work as abstractions. But, the process is so interesting that even the most far-from-reality viewer will have a hard time resisting the urge to dig into each piece's multiple layers. Quite simply, the series is composed of scanned images of dead animals, particularly birds, some mixed with acrylic paint and blown up to 48 -by-56-inch posters. However, as an intensive artistic process they're "two-min- ute performances" that straddle two- and three-dimensions, abstraction and real- ism, life and transition. To produce the images, Girvin uses birds as a paintbrush. She manipulates and moves their bodies while they're being scanned to create dis- continuous lines and amorphous shapes. The results are spontaneous, beautiful, and haunting. "I think I'm doing work that's very similar to abstract expressionism or action painting," she says. Inspired by a monoprint workshop at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Girvin says she found the original use of scanning too "two-dimensional," but the placement of organic, three- dimensional beings onto the scanner itself worked to create depth. "The scanning is just a technique I have to use to get where I want to get." She originally began the series using fish and poultry, triggered by the stark presentation of food sources in other countries, like Mexico, where whole dead animals are lined up for purchase in markets, as compared to the "sterility" of pack- aged food in the States. (She often saw animals slaughtered for their meat on the farm where she grew up, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and so food production has never been as obscure to her as to the average American.) As she started to work more with animals, her attention shifted to birds— warm-blooded creatures to which humans more easily relate, she says. "I like the beauty of birds. I like their freedom, their gestures—they have such 'ta-da' about them. Their wings: You can spread them like someone f lashing a fan." Looking more closely at her images reveals this thinking. The iridescent shimmer of a hum- mingbird's wing glints, and the stiff silhouette of a claw emerges through orange paint. The birds hang, suspended in a gravity-less vac- uum surrounded by empty space, yet always moving. "It doesn't look like a snapshot," she says. "You get a sense of transition." For Girvin, that's the most important theme. Girvin earned her undergraduate degree in perceptual psychology at Bucknell Uni- versity, in central Pennsylvania. Instead of pursuing a career in psychology, she went back to school, in 1978, to get her Master of Fine Arts at the Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia. When she graduated, she focused on photography. But while her ear- lier works reflected her tendency toward abstraction—pictures that require investiga- tion—she soon shifted her focus to lenticular photography, a process that involves layer- ing similar images atop one another to produce an animated effect. "The subject matter of my new work is much more Presence With Abscence #41 Presence With Absence #42 aspenpeak-magazine.com 119 "Conventional photographers are observers. I'm a participant in these photographs." —Linda Girvin