Unique photo-based process on archival silver paper with paint
36 x 24 inches
Aline Mare began her career in Lower Manhattan, with a background in theater and experimental film. She completed undergraduate work at SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from SFAI. She continues to experiment, exploring metaphors of nature and its transformative relationship to the human psyche and the state of our planet. alinemare.com, @alinelillie
I have been repeatedly drawn to encounters with Joshua trees during extended trips to the Mojave. In this suite of images, I have immersed myself in those landscapes, open to the pull of objects and narratives embedded in the nakedness of the desert floor, and to powerful poignant artifacts offered by the Joshua tree itself.
Using a process of scanning, shooting, layering and painting, I gather and transform bits of plants, fossils and desert detritus into a kind of psychic snapshot. The eroded objects become talismans; charged artifacts of past habitations bleached and fractured from the sun and heat. Each tableau is a theater set where time becomes the actor—both giver and destroyer of life; a space where quiet mysteries are revealed, brilliantly illuminated under the desert sun. Each story is told in broken narratives, fragments conveying the overlapping worlds—the flora and fauna abandoned to the forces of nature, reclaiming the land and remnants of cultures, whose rise and fall marks the desert floor. I create organic interpretations of nature in a process of transmutation, working with a hybrid form of mixed media, pointing to the possibilities of change and renewal, using scanning and image-making to reveal secret architectures that speak to a sense of the forces of forms in nature as metaphors for the cycles of life, death and rebirth.
I am interested in creating a rich layering of sources: a poetic language where systems of generation and communication are fused to form a new language. I am looking to reveal the fractal mirroring of roots, veins, minerals and bone, where the interplay between various life forms and systems articulate a 21st-century vision of ourselves as truly not separate from nature.