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PHANTASM
Irene Imfeld
SEPTEMBER 4 - OCTOBER 19, 2024
Irene Imfeld
Irene Imfeld is from a small town in Ohio. She moved to San Francisco in 1970, studied textiles in Berkeley, then showed textile work throughout northern California. She worked as a graphic designer in the publishing industry until the early 2000s when she bought a large-format printer and set up her Oakland studio. She attended numerous workshops and reviews; assisted artist Susannah Hays with exhibits and teaching at UC Berkeley; went on an art- exchange trip to Japan; was an active member of SFMOMA’s Foto Forum; and joined the Bay Area Photographers Collective. At BAPC she met Henry Bowles and together they opened PHOTO, a regional gallery in Oakland, 2010-15. In the 2010s, Irene also received two funded residencies and self-published a monograph. Vacant Nests #21 was chosen by William Wegman as Grand Prize Winner in the 2014 PhotoAlliance competition in San Francisco. The Vacant Nests series was winner of the portfolio competition at Soho Photo Gallery, NY, with a solo exhibit in 2016. Her work was given solo exhibitions at the Peninsula Art Museum, the Bolinas Museum, and the Fresno Art Museum, all in California. She was a board member of PhotoAlliance, 2015-18.
Irene Imfeld is interested in the rhythm and flow of natural forces and specializes in images that immerse viewers in the chaos of the natural environment. She finds the bond between humans and other living systems to be simple and instinctive, not requiring labels and measurements. Her nature based imagery draws on aesthetic traditions from realism to rococo. Always grounded in common reality and composed in camera, the subjects are more- or-less recognizable as her work has become more abstract over time.
DeWitt Cheng on Irene Imfeld
Some of the earliest photographic images were of botanical subjects, and the natural world has continued to fascinate photographers with both scientific and poetic inclinations-and sometimes both..... Irene Imfeld's combination of realism and abstract structure varies, depending on the subject matter. The relatively 'straight' portrayals of mushrooms (albeit magnified, and composed with an eye to abstraction), and the sharply rendered bird plumage of the 2016 Vacant Nest series fall nicely within the 150-year tradition of fine-art nature photography. However, the lyrical abstractions enabled by digital technology-duplicating, reversing, superimposing, altering color palettes-are impressionistic, subjective, and decidedly contemporary. The abstract traceries of the With a Crane's Eye series may derive from close-up photographs of plants and grasses, but Imfeld transforms them into pyrotechnic calligraphy like the paintings of Jackson Pollock, both spatially flat and infinitely deep, and perhaps even visionary and ecstatic, if we are allowed to use such terms in our ironic era. Imfeld's photographs remind us of John Muir advice to anxious urbanites: not to
'hike, but to 'saunter ... reverently' in the sainte terre of nature.
-DeWitt Cheng, 2019
DeWitt Cheng is an independent critic and curator in the San Francisco Bay Area with twenty-plus years’ experience writing for print and inline publications, including Artweek, ArtLtd., Artillery, East Bay Express, Artomity, East Bay Monthly, HuffingtonPost.com, Art21.com, SanFranciscoArtMagazine.com, VisualArtSource.com, and The DemocracyChain.org. He served as Curator for Stanford Art Spaces and the Peninsula Museum of Art, and is the author of monograph on the painter William Harsh. He is also an artist, photographer and blogger (ArtOpticon.us)