The contemporary artist Eileen Neff “works with photo-based images and installation, picturing the natural and constructed worlds. Her “straight-forward representations, constructed images and sheer abstractions reflect the breadth of pictorial approaches—these approaches make poetic sense of her experience in the world.” And the works are inviting! Neff’s works shroud the viewer in its aesthetic beauty and mesmerizes us into a inquiry of Neff’s experiences in the visual world.
Resources for this podcast episode include: Eileen Neff website and Bridgette Mayer Gallery
Follow Eileen on IG @eileenneff”studio and Bridgette Mayer Gallery @bmayergallery
Script: Episode 152: Eileen Neff: “Traveling into View”
Hello my art enthusiasts! My guest today is the contemporary artist Eileen Neff. She works with photo-based images and installation, picturing the natural and constructed worlds. Her “straight-forward representations, constructed images and sheer abstractions reflect the breadth of pictorial approaches—these approaches make poetic sense of her experience in the world.” And the works invite you, the viewer, to see and consider diverse, engaging forms of display and presentations, to take in and reorient our visual senses into deeper layers and narratives embedded in the natural world. She brings the familiar, like a leaf, a mass of bushes on the roadside, a mountain ridge in a “new context” In the immediacy of our looking experience we are brought into the present moment—Her works shroud the viewer in its aesthetic beauty and mesmerizes us into a inquiry of Neff’s experiences in the visual world.
Allow me to journey with you one of Neff’s installations, one of my favorites from 2012 “Three of Four Clouds”—An underlying theme of Neff’s work and practice is “my response to being somewhere else.” In the work “Three or Four clouds” the installation is her experiences in her studio without physical travel.” Neff’s inquiry encompasses more than the objects that make up the installation. She considers the manner in which they are curated in the gallery space. I will talk about that more with Neff in a few minutes. That is a fascinating area to explore with her. What intersects with the visual objects is the role poetry, Neff is also a poet, construction of text articulates through her work. The title itself, “Three or Four Clouds” is the first stanza of “Of the Surface of Things,” by Wallace Stevens, 1919. It is reprinted in its entirety on the wall text of the installation.
The first stanza reads “In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four Hills and a cloud.”
Let’s consider Neff’s approach to experiences, her daily pleasures, in the studio and her “photographic decisions or strategies of her photographic practice that transform those experiences into a body of images. Her viewpoint is the 29th floor of a Philadelphia apartment building in a “space as carefully composed as her work.” From her studio, “Neff sees clouds pass, birds visits, and she reflects upon the play and beauty of natural light. She captures the poetic and the sublime.” “Three or Four Clouds,” was exhibited at Bridgette Mayer Gallery in 2012. As the viewer, I engage in photographs of the installation in the gallery spaces.
She expresses clouds, for example, through diverse media. On a pedestal, titled “Postcloud” is a black multi-level rack—placed in that rack is an image of a billowing white cloud suspended in a deep blue sky. What we see is the same cloud in a cloud and its clouds that is fragmented into postcards The fragments are identical sized “post”cards, they remind me of paint chips. Right behind the work on the wall is an image, titled “A Cloud and its Clouds” of an open book on a wood table, one page is blank, on the other we see a similar view of a blue sky with a cloud.
“One and Three Birds” is a series three different presentations of the same landscape scene, a grove of trees, its willowy branches, full of green leaves brush against a light blue sky, they are arranged one image atop another, forming a vertical line. One is in a golden frame, one a very contemporary white frame and one is unframed. What holds my attention in each of these presentations is red toy bird placed on the two dimensional landscapes—it is referenced in a fourth representation, installed to the left of the stacked landscape images. The red bird is propped atop the foliage—it is part of the pictorial space; a three dimensional object arranged on a two dimensional landscape. Neff’s three iterations of “bird on a tree,” invites us to explore multiple readings, shifting viewpoints of a single image.
Adjacent to the smaller, more intimate objects and images are large scale sky lines works, One titled “Ordinary Day” is breathtaking. Neff further explores the sublime of the massive skies, by creating compositions of photographic images, they form into horizontal horizons—juxtaposed one atop another, we see a sweep of clouds and just below embraces a thick swathe of black embraces the canvas and forms a boundary line to a sea of blue swirling with a translucent white it reminds me of a sweet confection. I later learned through the catalog for the exhibition, Ordinary Day depicts a group of clouds outside her studio window along with their reflection on her studio table, demonstrates how complex this inside/outside relationship can get. I also learned the photograph was unmanipulated. “Neff’s precise cropping of the image makes it challenging to grasp what we are actually looking at and encourages us to become more deeply aware of the intriguing conundrum such cropping can engender.”
This is just a glimpse of the artistic mind of Neff, her inquiry, to “look at photographs with the experience of looking through windows.” She said “the studio is the window and the camera becomes its twinned, fixing frame” Neff through her practice of “cropping, reframing, replication, inversion, and re-materialization” she address the many ways we can see and imagine the natural world. As I write this in my work space, surrounded by shelves of art books, a plain black desk, a plethora of sharpened pencils, notebooks I look out the windows into the front yard, the sky, the sinewy branches sway, sun filters through, snow forms in piles atop the bushes below. I have looked out this window a million times but through Neff, I see it re-imagined, my senses overflow with a new awareness of place. So now that you have a taste, a gleaning of her work and practice, join me in my conversation with Eileen Neff.