The High Desert Art Fair is excited to announce that legendary designer and digital art pioneer April Greiman will be exhibiting new work — and signing her book — at next weekend's High Desert Art Fair in Pioneertown, CA, in partnership with Harold's Gallery.
April Greiman helped transform the visual language of our time — from importing European New Wave design to California in the '70s, to being one of the first artists to embrace the Macintosh as a fine art tool in the '80s. Her work sits at the radical intersection of technology, art, and human perception, and it's just as alive today.
LOCATION - BOOTH #8
DRIVE-BY SHOOTING and WHITE SPACE (images of each book below)
Drive-by Shooting
artist's statement
I began this project over twenty years ago with a 35mm Nikon, then a Polaroid SX-70, capturing glimpses of tree trunks and plant and leaf forms from my moving car. I think what attracted me was the tension between control and lack of control this technique encouraged in intuitively compiling a personal record of nature. I wanted to bring natural form into my camera almost unconsciously, exposing its hidden energy within the act of seeing.
I now use digital cameras, not just as a source of imagery but as a gateway to yet another dynamic process hidden within the dna of the computer. Natural energy is transformed into images via the camera lens, these images are then transformed into pixels – into a parallel landscape of transformative digital energy. Grass becomes fur, solids become transparent, light becomes volume, an instant becomes an object of extended study. Material objects dematerialize into semi-transparent blurs in which foreground and background lose their former identity. In contrast, immaterial qualities of pure light and color take on unexpected substance and become ‘objects’ in their own right — streaks and washes of color develop an almost painterly presence equal to the now-translucent solid forms, creating a single — almost biological — texture. This equivalence is reinforced by the relatively low resolution of the original captures, in which a common fabric of individual pixels subsumes all. Each stage in the process — the original image captures, their processing in software, and their final rendition in the complex act of printing is an opportunity for discovery, in which the dance between the physical and digital languages, the weave of nature and technology, is ever alive.
Seeing is a kind of thinking, an instantaneous synthesis from a chaos of simultaneous visual impressions — a coherent whole, a single perception, a unique observation. In these images, as they deconstruct that process, the observer is observed — navigating unexplored territory in which the process is the product, and the journey itself becomes the destination.
WHITESPACE
foreword
April Greiman’s WhiteSpace is a collection of 33 digital photographs of landscapes and objects in the built environment, enhanced by curious digital icons and vertical typographic texts, both autobiographical and philosophical. Initially captured while driving or walking through remote spaces, these images represent her ongoing vision of color and lightness. But this book is more than that. Interleaved with photographs are the musings of 25 women on the subject of whitespace. These extraordinarily personal insights create a rhythmic meditation on emptiness, openness, beauty, fear, and a multitude of provocative perceptions. April’s friendships with women, like her images, are part of her spectrum of light, nurtured over decades, simmered to perfection.
A few years ago, April and I hosted a color workshop in Desert Hot Springs. The program was void of any ubiquitous color wheels or theory talk — is white the presence or absence of all colors combined? Nobody cares. Instead, the highlight for many of us was a silent walk in the desert and a night swim observing the stars. Why a color workshop in the desert, or for that matter, at night? And that is the point. Turns out the pale, pale desert might be the very best place to practice seeing the world through April’s eyes — all color and lightness.
WhiteSpace is like a trip to the desert with April and her wonderful colleagues. A master class in shadow and light.
- Laurie Haycock Makela
