"In Break Boundary, Jenee Mateer creates visual equivalents of "deliverance" and "lifting up," elevating the spirit and transforming descriptive photographic realities into realms of chromatic liquescence. In the book's first part, "The World Is Water," boundaries are dissolved between water and sky, sky and water. A brilliant expanse of lake or ocean sharply meets air, blending into vapors and an occasional cloud. The color is tantalizingly unreal, beautiful but uncomfortable. In the second part, "The Sky Is Lemonlime," Mateer goes further with multiple dissolving points onto her layered landscapes. A possible mountain range is silhouetted against a sky and transmutes into a luminous color space that repeats and undulates in a linear pattern across the image, changing hue, saturation, or transparency as it rolls. Mateer's images are dances of pure color, extrapolated and freed from descriptive form, almost ecstatic in their intensity."
—Barbara Shamblin, Professor of Art Emerita, Salve Regina University

"Strangely, the world is just catching on to the fact that several centuries of landscape paintings are no less constructed than digital photography. Similarly, Jenee Mateer's photographic skills of layering, blending, cropping, and flipping parallel painterly skills. Mateer's photographs capture the interaction of richly hued skies, vast water bodies, and radiant energy. If you catch the glint, glimmer, or glow of either Mark Rothko's color block paintings or James Wellings's Degradé photograms (since 1986), consider that many artists feel tempted to pinpoint where sea ends and sky begins, yet few capably depict light's complexity so well as Mateer."
—Sue Spaid, curator and author of Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies

"Mateer has a singular ability to create intriguing abstract images she constructs from her photographic captures of sea/sky/landscapes. She combines a mastery of color with recurring horizontals to present meditative compositions within a square format. At first glance, her works often appear to be paintings rather than photographs, with effects on viewers' perceptions that are reminiscent of Albers, Davis, and, most strongly, Rothko. The rich images in Break Boundary convey the three aspects I find most powerful in her work: beauty, mystery, and surprise. Her two poems and the title of each image deepen our understanding of the artist's inspiration and process, while letting us fully enjoy the images on our own terms."
—Mark Holdrege, art collector