Artist Statement
“And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing it magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself.”
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
The first time I read Proust, I awaited this magical scene. I had known of its significance before I ever opened the pages of his novel. When I reached it, however, I was not prepared to be transported through so many portals of time and space, within the mind of a character wrought from black marks on a white page. There is mystery on so many levels here, through the printed word, through an experienced taste, through the glass of memory.
As a photographer, I have often wondered if a visual image could possess such transformative powers. This seems especially challenging for the photograph, which is often rooted in some physical reality. To transcend that limit and touch a deeper realm, one that is both specific and conceptual, personal and universal, emotional and cerebral, one must plunge directly into the heart of the unknown.
And so I have done just that. Protected by layers of Goretex and down, I have headed straight into the fury of the blizzard and discerned the eyes of the storm. The images that comprise Snowbound describe a cultural landscape in which the objects of our recreation and occupation merge with the natural world. I am not interested in documentation a visual fact but in extracting metaphorical truth. On the surface, these images seem to have captured moments in time. Slowly, quietly, there emerges an implied suggestion of time passage and life cycles. Within the heart of a spare winter, other seasons emerge – a suspended hammock, brown grass, bubbles of breath breaking through the surface of ice in a frozen man-made pond. These scenes suggest, upon contemplation, the temporal nature of all things.
I am drawn to those structures and human traces that provide refuge of a point of reference in an otherwise vast and ambiguous space. Such anchors are triggers, holding within them the seeds of memory. The Snowbound images reveal the life within seemingly barren and familiar spaces. They encourage the viewer to be present to one’s surroundings in a reflective way. Like the familiar but unarticulated sensation of a tea-soaked Madeleine, these images transport the viewer to an internalized landscape where one might feel a leap of joy of a tug of melancholy. And hopefully, entering into the profound space of these large-scale images, he/she may experience a significant shift, subtle but potent, like a draught from the past.
Snowbound consists of over 50 color photographs. An exhibition of Snowbound would be comprised of as few as ten and as many as thirty large-scale prints. These images, made using a 4x5 camera, are printed as digital c-prints and mounted on museum board. The 28”x36” prints are framed in white wooden frames which measure approximately 32”x40”.
Captions
Lisa M. Robinson, Wish, 2005, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Solo, 2005, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Running Fence, 2003, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Daydream, 2005, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Erasure, 2005, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, At Rest, 2004, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Breathe, 2005, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Wound, 2007, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Harvest, 2006, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
Lisa M. Robinson, Valhalla, 2006, digital c-print, 28”x36”, 32”x40” framed
