Joanna Gabler, after many years of working as a painter in oils—a medium she continues to explore—and in straight photography, first attempted to combine her different visions in digital photography in 2008. Using common editing tools in her own original way, she attempts to extract the unseen energies behind physical reality. Since then she has visited various cities around the world—her native Warsaw, Odessa, Paris, Venice, and Rome, as well as New York, where she lived thirteen years—and looked at them afresh, with a mode of feeling and seeing that can only be expressed when she has broken down the data she has captured with her camera and reconstructed it in her own terms. Out of the forms she has recorded she creates new symmetries and color patterns which reveal the hidden life behind the plants, rocks, buildings, and objects she sees. As she works with the forms she has captured, new forms emerge, which may be totally unfamiliar in reference to the original thing as observed in the world. The viewer may may well recognize the shapes of branches by their twists and turns and their gnarled contours, but the trees are transformed into ideal symmetries or asymmetries. Some of this finished images may remind one of gemstone or a mandala, or even patterns on an oriental carpet.
However they appear, they have traveled a long distance from three-dimensional physical reality, through Joanna’s eye, through the camera lens, through the computer to the print. They have become created objects in their own right and add a new dimension to the objects they originally came from.
In these ten views of New York, she presents her own visions, which she has developed from her experience of various familiar locations in the City.
She makes these works available in limited edition archival inkjet prints of various sizes, from 4 x 6 in. to 60 x 80 in. and range in price from $125 to $1750.
To purchase prints, contact Joanna at http://naturetransfigured.com. (joanna [at] naturetransfigured [dot] com)
SEE NOW, in the Berkshire Review, a report on Joanna Gabler’s exhibition of orchid mandalas at the Warsaw University Botanical Garden.
These do look especially fine, they translate well in this unframed format and surrounded by the “white” space around the image. They remind me of cubist collages or posters now that they are integrating samples of letter forms along with the metropolitan geometry and iconography. It might be interesting to see them integrate Cyrillic or other alphabets, and give them an even more “exotic” flavor.
They also have a hint of appearing like watercolors, which would be really hard to execute were they so. But the minute dot of the inkjet dot, a miracle of modern tech, also does things that are impossible to execute any other way!
These are superb — the real Delirious New York!
The next step would be to construct a real city using these beautiful images as plans (and sections, elevations, axonometrics, perspectives etc).
I am familiar with Joanna’s work in this style with organic sourses like rocks and trees, this new venture into the built environment works equally well as the city often feels kaleidescopic, particularly when our visula fiel is filled with architectural elements such as the high rise canyons of NYC. The details of architecture and signage become the fractal lace of these images, wonderful, thanks for showing us a new way to view or imagine the city.