Untitled (2016) “Water” series
Mary Wessel knows how to wrest magic from photography. She produced her 2008-13 “Worldscape” series in the darkroom, pouring acid and other substances on photographic paper to produce luminous, multi-hued abstractions suggesting imaginary worlds and events.
More recently, Wessel has returned to using a camera, standing on a dock over a North Carolina creek with a 35 mm Nikon and shooting the sunlight that scatters across the water. The results, lightly manipulated in Photoshop to heighten tonal contrasts, offer another evocation of imaginary places.
Wessel’s images freeze the play of water and sun in dramatic topographical patterns that lend themselves to a variety of interpretations, from brain scans to Abstract Expressionist paintings.
“Water is such a fascinating topic because it’s everywhere,” Wessel said. “We’re composed of it. We can’t live without it. We’re born through it.”
“Water can be mysterious and very dark; it’s adaptable and ever changing with infinite variability,” she added. “I try to capture the sense of surface and below, the unknown underneath. To me the images are very psychological.”
Like her “Worldscape” series, these new black and white works are also very painterly, animated by mobile organic shapes and folding, undulating rhythms. Wessel compares the organization of her compositions to the scattering of an electrical charge.
She achieves different effects by varying the zoom, the shutter speed, and her physical distance from the water, capturing it at different times of day, but always in sunlight. Some images evoke dark calligraphic brushstrokes skittering across white fields. Others elicit comparisons with prehistoric cave paintings, still others, lunar photographs.
But perhaps the dominant metaphor attached to these images is that of consciousness itself, where memory and perception, fragments of knowledge and flashes of insight, roil and collide, yielding an ever-changing awareness.
Untitled (2016) “Water” series, all images courtesy the artist
