Break Boundary

by Jenee Mateer, Photographer & Chair of the Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education at Towson University

Thrive Atelier: 302 E. Federal @ Cork Factory#10 5th Floor South Balitmore MD 21202 JeneeMateer.com | gftbooks.com | makebeautifulchange.com

Opening Reception | October 18 | 7-10pm

On View October 18 – November 30, 2018

Hancock Solar Gallery |1601 Guilford Ave | Baltimore, MD 21202

Hot House Hybrids is a continuation of the flower series I made for the Earth is Intimate in 2017. I call those images “Big Girls and Painted Ladies” emphasizing the flowers’ metaphorical connection to the female and the feminine. The use of watercolor in combination with the photographs allows for a double meaning. The flowers are meant to represent females and suggest the feminine but they are also literally painted and dominate the frame. These are flowers in all their beautiful glory. They verge on cliché. They attract and repel. I hoped the images might lead the viewer not only to question our notion of beauty (natural and unnatural), and photography (straight and manipulated) but also the terms “big girl” and “painted lady”. These latter are less than empowering descriptions for the female –– the first, a euphemistic term used to describe an overweight woman or a tall woman or perhaps a naïve young woman and the second, a term used to describe a woman whose sexuality is for sale. These are terms used by culture to denigrate the female and limit her physicality and sexuality. Beauty too is a questionable premise, in art, in nature, and as it applies to the female and humans in general. What does it mean to be a beautiful female? What makes an image beautiful?

For me, beauty has to do with character. In this series, I wondered what might happen if I allowed my girls to get older, wiser, louder, more daring. What would happen if I allowed myself to more thoroughly embrace painting and turn it too, metaphorically, into an empowerment. Where is the boundary between the beautiful and the horrific, the ripe and the rotten, between naivete and wisdom? In these I recognize that I am Eve and I am getting older. Like Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, I have dissected and reassembled these hot house hybrids from the genetic shards of abstract painting and straight photography and its digital progeny. Are they monstrous desecrations of the photograph and bastardizations of painting or are they a new genetic strain, stronger, faster, smarter?

These images are connected to the work in my new book – Break Boundary Places Real and Imagined – by the color I capture from the real world and the color I create in my studio. It is perhaps not immediately clear, however, that the connection between these two bodies of work also hinges on the idea of the Break Boundary, the place of transformation where one thing turns into something else. I am interested in that moment where to borrow from Lawrence Weschler’s book on Robert Irwin, we forget, for a moment, the name of what we see.

Artist bio:

Jenee Mateer is a photographer and video artist who was born in 1965 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. in English/Modern Studies from the University of Virginia in 1987 and her M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1996. In 2007, she joined the faculty of Towson University, where she is currently Associate Professor of Photo Imaging and Chair of the Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues, including the ArtHamptons Art Fair, Biggs Museum of American Art, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Jordan Faye Contemporary in Baltimore, Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, Masur Museum of Art, Newport Museum, Rhode Island Foundation, San Francisco Art Market, Scope International Art Fair in Miami, and Texas Contemporary Art Fair in Houston. She is the author of The Animals (2012), her essays and photographs have appeared in the 1st International Photography Annual (2012), The Photo Review, Masters of Photography, and Philosophy of Photography, and her photographs are in numerous private collections, including China Trust Bank.