Amy Theiss Giese
A Fine Art photographer and educator, Amy's works have been seen in numerous venues in New England, internationally and throughout the nation including the Photographic Resource Center, the Danforth Museum of Art, Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins CO as well as Elam Project Space Gallery in Auckland New Zealand.
Alchemical Spasmodic
"Absence and presence, a call and response" These words from Amy I felt captured part of the experience I have when viewing her works. These haunting abstract, almost ethereal images bring to mind questioning the space they inhabit; that we inhabit. The seeming absence of direct form and composition heighten the need to respond to them. There is a beautiful randomness that appears as smoke billowing then dissipating. Liquefying and eroding visible facts into a dreamlike environment. These are photographs in a unique abstract sense. Amy is using photographic chemical processes to produce painterly images on photographic paper. They appear to me as timeless ideas caged for centuries in amber, these slow-moving processes have given us a sense of a beautiful rhythm and balance contingent upon an incidental alchemy.
- Steven J. Duede, Fine Art Photographer, Initiative Founder
The work is an attempt to transform an specific, articulated place into a less tangible space so we may see it anew – the place of the darkroom, the mental and physical space that I occupy, and the translation of those experiences into an object that holds their residue.
Statement
Tactile yet indefinable forms swim across the surface of the paper. Some have a faint sheen to them, like oil slicks or prisms, reflecting the quantum nature of light itself. Others reveal layers of subtle color, with a ghostly sense of depth. The range of marks and gestures is broad: flows that bleed together, stippled areas, lines that cut through pools of color, layers building up in places, sections that have been stripped down, excized or excavated. The colors that emerge vary wildly, from muted umbers and ochers to soft yellows, greens and muted shades of lavender to vivid pinks and oranges.
The images hover between painting and photography, mark making and chemical reactions, deliberately drawn elements and unexpected, unknowable results. My gestures collaborate with the light and time to create the physical changes in the silver. There is no reference to reality, no eidetic instant frozen on a piece of film. Yet I am very aware of the moment, of this reality, waiting and responding to the slow, ongoing alchemical reactions. There is an element of chance, of controlled chaos, of embracing change. The work is an attempt to transform an specific, articulated place into a less tangible space so we may see it anew – the place of the darkroom, the mental and physical space that I occupy, and the translation of those experiences into an object that holds their residue. Underlying it all is the tension between light and its corresponding shadow, absense and presense, a call and response.
Note on the process: Each image is a unique, camera-less, lens-less chemical painting using traditional black and white darkroom chemistry and the chromoskedasic sabatier process on both silver gelatin paper and chromogenic paper. Some images also layer the chemical painting with the skiagram process of directly recording shadow patterns at night on black and white paper. - Amy Theiss Giese
Amy Theiss Giese
Bio
Amy Theiss Giese is a Boston based artist and educator who teaches throughout New England. Giese received her MFA in Photography from Parsons The School for Design and her BA in Fine Arts from Amherst College. She also completed the New England School of Photography's Professional Program with honors. Giese's work is rooted in materialism, exploring what the fundamental forces for a given medium are, with her interest primarily in photographic and sound recordings of spaces and places. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
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