the return of my sunday local artist ramble

dear facebook, the social networking epicenter of the universe. I do enjoy your accessibility and easy connection to my friends, family and peers-but all the time you absorb is taking me away from my precious blog! Love, me

No more I tell ya! I am back to being a blogging regular. And with that statement I bring back the "my sunday local artist ramble". In the name of Woodstock's Levon Helm (yes, from the Band), who produces his own ramble aka the Midnight Ramble, I will highlight on my blog Carbon Copy a local artist that I admire every Sunday- hence the name "my sunday local artist ramble". There are so many incredible artists residing in the Hudson Valley region and beyond- some of my past rambles have included the work by Craig Barber, Judy Pfaff, Tatana Kellner, and Laura Moriarty to name a few.

Now that the logistics and excuses have been ironed out, this sunday I would like to present the work of Albany-area artist Jeri Eisenberg.

I first saw Jeri's work in Woodstock at BMG Galerie. These out of focus views of corners and crevices of the landscape on large panels of Japanese paper and thinly coated in encaustic had immediately grabbed my attention. Their majestic quality and delicate nature made them easy on the eyes- yet the disrupted view made from the lens and the use of several panels to create one image forced something deeper and more emotional. They are dream-like and visually unclear- but they make sense and are reconstructed in my mind into a familiar view.
These fractions of a "view" equate to something more than themselves....

from Jeri's beautiful Artist Statement:

I feel no need to seek out grand vistas or exotic locales, majestic mountain ranges or rushing rivers. It's the common wooded landscape of my day to day life that captures my attention. Many of the images in my current work are from areas close to my home; others are from farther flung places, but places that I just happen to be for one prosaic reason or another. They are places that are generally more ordinary than spectacular.

By photographing the treed landscape with a purposefully oversized pinhole or a radically defocused lens, however, I capture it as it is not often seen. The images are firmly grounded in the natural world, a particular place, a particular season, a particular time. But by obscuring detail, only the strongest brush strokes emerge: the images become sketches with light, literally and figuratively. They tend to float between there and not there, to dissolve into abstraction and reconfigure themselves back into recognizable form.

I began this series when my father, then 83, started loosing both his sight and his memory. Strangely, the work has been comforting. Beauty, though fleeting and fragmentary, seems to console me.

all images by Jeri Eisenberg.

You can also see Jeri's beautiful work at the Albany Center Gallery on view until Feb. 27 with 2 other artists. If you cannot make it out there, check out the Carrie Haddad Gallery or Galerie BMG website.