exhibition
Carrie Waldman, "New Work from the Anza-Borrego Desert"

About the exhibition

CARRIE WALDMAN
New Work from the Anza-Borrego Desert
Solo Exhibition / Works on Paper
July 3 – 19, 1992


Not satisfied with quick trips or short exposures, I moved to the desert mountains of southern California to explore the landscape, to research it deeply. These paintings come out of long exposure to these places, these events of geology and flora. They are not travel sketches. They are the result of a deeper, more focused vision. The experience of a place at a magic moment grows in memory, and like gems compressed with the pressure of time, something more results. The jewel like quality and extra clarify and beyond prosaic reality. They are inter landscapes, giving back the natural world as filtered through the experience of vision and memory. They are in the format of snap-shots, but are far from instant. The work is about the process of seeing deeply, looking hard. The small size insists that you get close. It invites you in and on through into another world. Its an intimate experience, a condensed diamond-like vision.

Every landscape is an event: mountains come up as erosion brings them back down in spreading alluvial fans, canyons are carved by furious but fleeting rains, patterns of plant life expand and contract with climate cycles, things flourish, bloom and go dormant with weather changes. Our transitory lives separate us from all but the quickest changes. These snap shots are a crystallization of the momentary event of landscape. The serial pieces document events down a canyon bottom, from mountain pool past palm grove to canyon mouth, or events in a certain geologically related zone such as an erosion contorted badlands, or the varieties of a species of plant life adapted to particular desert area. In the desert the land is exposed, geology is laid bare, the tracks of time are obvious; massive yet mysterious.

—Carrie Waldman