Judy Haberl
Iced Fictions: Stilled Garden I, 2001, Polaroid, 40" x 96"
Un paysage quelconque est un état de l'âme.
(Any sort of landscape is a condition of the soul.)
—H. F. Amiel, 31 October 1852
There are places that can only be imagined, and they are born in the mind's eye. Perhaps they are visions, or re-visions of some real places that we have known. I began working on Freeze, which became Iced Fictions, in 1998, as a desire to return to image making after working in sculpture for a long while. In reality, they are sculptural forms in ice that become images. The first images were made on the Polaroid 20" x 24" camera, and eventually on the Moby C 40" x 90" Polaroid camera, in New York City—the only one of its kind in the world. I also make regular C-print images in my studio. The making of the large Polaroid images requires trucking several freezers to New York for photographing.
These fictions are made by freezing sculptural objects that I have crafted, into ice. They began as a metaphor for what the camera does, freezing moments/images in time. I am deeply curious about the mythological territory that ice and frozen-ness suggests. It is a state of being that is located between preservation and annihilation. I find that this territory is ripe for investigating new ways of exploring landscape, portraiture, and still life genres. I like to think of these as contemporary oracles.
—Judy Haberl
Please join the artist for an informal gallery talk on Saturday, June 22 at 3pm.
