Photo/Synthesis

Aline Mare (images) & Olivia E. Sears (text)

Collage of layered cliché verre, photography, digital scans, and text, printed on Duratrans film, displayed in a triptych of LED lightboxes

Three lightboxes, each 25.5" x 37.5" x 1.25"

2021/22

Also available separately, $2000 each

Our collaborative work — a fusion of language and image — seeks new ways to comprehend our mysterious and complex relationship to nature in the twenty-first century.

 The underlying artwork of Photo/Synthesis combines painted backgrounds with photo-based imagery and objects collected from the natural world. Transparent surfaces are first painted by hand, then scratched and marked in abstract patterns. Objects are placed on the painted surfaces and digitally scanned. The scanner’s illumination functions as the light source in a contemporary interpretation of the nineteenth-century photographic process of cliché verre (from the French, “glass picture”). These collages layer source images that have been altered, painted, and recombined, allowing systems of generation and communication to form a new language of expression, alongside the familiar tools of painting, photography, and installation. The poetry and metaphor of scientific processes combine with the vibrant colors and fascinating architecture of various life forms — further layered with fragments of minerals, roots, and bone — to articulate a vision of ourselves as not truly separate from nature.