Victoria Berends is a Photography
Major studying at Tyler School of Art. Her introduction to the medium came at age
seventeen with traditional landscape studies. An interest in the concerns of
landscape and architectural structure underlies all of her photographic work.
Chemscapes, her most recent
work displayed, represents the culmination of her long-held interest in
landscape as a mode of surveying the world. Berends’ source material is the
seemingly haphazard detritus of industrial chemical residue. By multiplying
scale, Chemscapes re-imagines these
happenstances of chemical placement as true, inhabitable landscapes and unintended structures.
“Art at any sake,” as Berends puts it, suggests the urgency
central to Chemscapes. Any and all materials, in particular those
apparently antithetical to traditional notions about nature and space, must be
sublimated into the landscape form. The images compel the viewer to conside a
wider definition of landscape to bear in their encounter with Chemscapes. Berends identifies with Edward Burtynsky’s
position on such matters. Her work comments on the transformation of space
itself with out positing a political stance.
On a purely aesthetic level, Chemscapes is the result of spatial and
material abstraction. Although the work was shot digitally, the abstraction and
acidic color is captured within the original photographic record, not through
digital manipulation.
Ultimately, Berends lends us a new perspective by which to transgress
our usual notions of landscape and architecture.
-Travis Kniffin
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