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- "Isenberg Windows" by Annie Tiberio
The notion of "depth of field" takes on meta meanings in the current exhibition at Mad River Valley Arts in Waitsfield. "Reflecting on Reflections" features 30 striking images by the six photographers in a collective called f/7: Julie Parker, Annie Tiberio, Sandra Shenk, Elliot Burg, Rob Spring and Lisa Dimondstein.
Over the past decade, these colleagues have met to exchange ideas and support and to mount occasional group exhibitions. The title of this show states exactly what it's about: pictures whose subjects literally reflect something else.
Not surprisingly, water is a common denominator. Whether calm or rippled, it's a mirror with endless fractals. Yet no matter what it reflects, we still recognize it as water, and that alone can lead to rabbit-hole musing about, oh, say, the duality of existence or the "as above, so below" principle of correspondence. What is reality, anyway?
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- "Reflecting Havana's Past" by Elliot Burg
Parker addresses this timely question with a remarkable 3D, in-the-round construction titled "Anamorphic Pond." "What happens when the virtual world looks more real than the thing it is reflecting?" she asks.
Watery images are also simply beautiful, such as the painterly abstraction of Dimondstein's "Looking Glass," shot in an abandoned quarry, and Parker's dreamy "Mood River."
Color catches the eye in Spring's "Winooski River #2" — bright red buttresses against green window frames. Their shimmer, again, tells us this is a reflection. A sentence in Spring's artist statement sums up the appeal of the subject-within-a-subject: "Once I'm drawn into this world of reflective surfaces, it is hard to leave, as every move reveals an entirely different and unique world."
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- "Winooski River #2" by Rob Spring
Shenk doubles down on this visual trickery with the use of a lens ball. Her image titled "A World Within a World" captures a lake — itself reflecting the surrounding landscape — inside a snow-globe-like ball. "This particular photo conveys to me the fragile state and smallness of our world today," she writes.
Glass, of course, is also an endlessly reflective surface — and can be difficult to photograph. But Burg makes it look effortless in "Reflecting Havana's Past." The picture is actually of a curved, mullioned window, but what we see are shards of historic buildings across the street, framed by a brilliant blue sky.
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- "A World Within a World" by Sandra Shenk
Tiberio writes that her f/7 colleagues inspired her to reach beyond representational subjects, and she did just that with "Isenberg Windows." Changing the camera's settings in between multiple exposures, she shot a C-shaped building, from inside its courtyard, on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. "What emerged was a crazy quilt of colors and oddly shaped squares of glass that reflected back to me the colors around the building," Tiberio writes. The trippy abstraction is an explosion of multiple viewpoints, raucous yet somehow held together, kind of like America.
"Reflecting on Reflections" gives viewers much to see and ponder. The exhibit is on view through April 27. Learn more at madrivervalleyarts.org.