Doris Mitsch - Artist's Statement

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Artist’s Statement

Who among us hasn’t noticed it—the strange doubling of forms and faces—the echo in the world? The waves in rock, the veins in leaves, the ghostly flowerings of frost. As though God, deep in his labors, had suddenly run out of ideas, or, perhaps, surprised by the loneliness of his creation, had set out, in the eleventh hour, to stitch the world together—the sound of wind to the sound of water, the ruffling of field to the ruffling of fur, the memories of the living to the hopes of the dead. A familiar universe. A sea of small recognitions. A vast brotherhood of thoughts and things. That is what he dreamed.

It was too late. It didn’t work. We misread intention as accident, correspondence as coincidence. Only rarely, wandering through this world, did we feel that someone was trying to tell us something.

– Mark Slouka, Lost Lake

What can dark learn from the edge of a thing?

– Peter Wegner, The Other Today

These photographs are from a series of digital explorations of organic forms, isolated by a sweeping beam of light in the dark.

I’m especially interested in the visual rhyming relationships between natural forms, and in what happens when I focus on their formal qualities to the point of forgetting what an object is. Others often can’t identify the subjects of these photos, and I enjoy that—not that I’m trying to disguise my subjects, but I want to explore beyond the associations we usually have with artifacts of nature.

The process I’m using is somewhat unusual, with digital technology replacing not only the darkroom, but the camera as well. I’m shooting with a flatbed scanner, which offers interesting opportunities. Unlike a traditional camera, a flatbed scanner captures an image by slowly moving both the light and the lens across the subject—essentially lighting and photographing it from multiple angles in one long exposure. This produces a single image stitched together from thousands of tiny slivers, to which I then make endless, minute adjustments. Each photograph takes hours to make.

This offers me a subtly different way of looking at my subjects—a perspective that can’t be seen through a camera lens or the naked eye, and a way of illumination that can’t be duplicated with fixed lights. It also offers a uniquely detailed view, as I can magnify each image and work on it down to the pixel-by-pixel level. High-resolution prints can be as wide as sixty inches, and are made with archival inks or pigments on rag paper, which gives them an inky, matte surface and a dimensional feel.


	DORIS MITSCH - Home - Exhibitions - Articles + Reviews - Recent Work - Statement - Contact
	..... Artist’s Statement Who among us hasn’t noticed it—the strange doubling of forms and faces—the echo in the world? The waves in rock, the veins in leaves, the ghostly flowerings of frost. As though God, deep in his labors, had suddenly run out of ideas, or, perhaps, surprised by the loneliness of his creation, had set out, in the eleventh hour, to stitch the world together—the sound of wind to the sound of water, the ruffling of field to the ruffling of fur, the memories of the living to the hopes of the dead. A familiar universe. A sea of small recognitions. A vast brotherhood of thoughts and things. That is what he dreamed. It was too late. It didn’t work. We misread intention as accident, correspondence as coincidence. Only rarely, wandering through this world, did we feel that someone was trying to tell us something. – Mark Slouka, Lost Lake What can dark learn from the edge of a thing? – Peter Wegner, The Other Today These photographs are from a series of digital explorations of organic forms, isolated by a sweeping beam of light in the dark. I’m especially interested in the visual rhyming relationships between natural forms, and in what happens when I focus on their formal qualities to the point of forgetting what an object is. Others often can’t identify the subjects of these photos, and I enjoy that—not that I’m trying to disguise my subjects, but I want to explore beyond the associations we usually have with artifacts of nature. The process I’m using is somewhat unusual, with digital technology replacing not only the darkroom, but the camera as well. I’m shooting with a flatbed scanner, which offers interesting opportunities. Unlike a traditional camera, a flatbed scanner captures an image by slowly moving both the light and the lens across the subject—essentially lighting and photographing it from multiple angles in one long exposure. This produces a single image stitched together from thousands of tiny slivers, to which I then make endless, minute adjustments. Each photograph takes hours to make. This offers me a subtly different way of looking at my subjects—a perspective that can’t be seen through a camera lens or the naked eye, and a way of illumination that can’t be duplicated with fixed lights. It also offers a uniquely detailed view, as I can magnify each image and work on it down to the pixel-by-pixel level. High-resolution prints can be as wide as sixty inches, and are made with archival inks or pigments on rag paper, which gives them an inky, matte surface and a dimensional feel.