$40.00 U.S. (trade discount)
E-book TBD.
Hardcover (PLC)
88 pages with 34 color photographs by the author
11.5″ x 11.875″ landscape
ISBN 978–1–938086–59–5
Published in October 2018
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the American Land Publishing Project.
Events and Exhibitions
Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 7:00pm
The Ivy Bookshop
6080 Falls Road Baltimore, MD 21209
October 18 – November 30, 2018
Hot House Hybrids Exhibition
Hancock Solar Gallery at Nelson Kohl,
20 E Lanvale St, Baltimore, MD
by Jenee Mateer
concluding essay by Francine Weiss
Like Rothko’s paintings, Mateer’s photographs make lasting impressions!
A “break boundary” refers to the transformative point at which any system suddenly and irrevocably changes from its original state into something new. The term, first coined by Kenneth E. Boulding in 1963, serves as the underlying metaphor for the pioneering photographs of Jenee Mateer, who was also inspired by the paintings of Mark Rothko and photographic seascapes of Hiroshi Sugimoto to create works of art that challenge traditional understandings of landscape and photography.
In Mateer’s artworks, the horizon that divides water and land from sky shifts and grows and merges, producing a surreal interaction of natural elements with striking bands of colors that transform lakes, streams, and the ocean into imaginative places, both real and imagined. These layered photographs in turn suggest places where light and composition transform water, land, and sky into rhythmic patterns of shimmering opalescence and luscious colors that suggest the spirit of a place unconstrained by descriptive form.
Break Boundary features 34 of Mateer’s masterful creations. As Francine Weiss writes in her conclusion: “From surface to self, Jenee Mateer takes the viewer on a journey from one psychological and spiritual state to another. In Mateer’s waterscapes, the conventional or anticipated boundaries between land, water, and sky begin to vanish; horizons multiply and join: and the break boundary emerges.” Like Rothko’s paintings, Mateer’s photographs make lasting impressions.
About
About the Author
Jenee Mateer is a photographer, video artist, and Associate Professor of Photo Imaging and Chair of the Department of Art + Design, Art History, and Art Education at Towson University. Her photographs are in numerous private collections, including China Trust Bank, and they have been exhibited widely, including shows at the ArtHamptons Art Fair, Biggs Museum of American Art, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Jordan Faye Contemporary in Baltimore, Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, Masur Museum of Art, Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island Foundation, San Francisco Art Market, Scope International Art Fair in Miami, and Texas Contemporary Art Fair in Houston.
About the Contributor
Francine Weiss is Senior Curator at the Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island who previously served as Acting Assistant Curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2010–2011), Curator of the Photographic Resource Center in Boston (2012–2014), and editor of Loupe Journal (2012–2014).
Slide Show
Praise
“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
My Place
Summer is where I most like to be, visiting my garden daily to take in the pungent smells of lavender, sage, tomato, basil, mint, oregano, dill, and dirt. I love the sound of cicadas and crickets accompanied by the drone of lawnmowers, and I never cease to be amazed by fireflies that glow yellow green in the dark. But what I most love about summer is that I get to spend time near water. Water has always helped me understand who I am.
After a visit to the lake or beach or when sitting at the pool, dappled sunlight plays through my closed eyelids. The sun is no longer hot, and a faint breeze rustles the trees, punctuated by the sounds of children’s voices. I often think of the beach, hold the wide expanse of water, the dome of the sky, in my mind. I can then still feel the soft sand under my toes and hear the rush of water, the endless rush of water as it moves up and over the beach, creating patterns that slip back into the sand.
The water never stops. The rhythm never ceases. Slippery sand, endless flow, the gliding and eliding of millions of particles never at rest, evolving, revolving and, above, clouds moving across the sky as Earth turns and the light shifts, creating every blue and green and gray one can imagine. At times, the horizon is clearly defined while, at other times, it becomes fuzzy, indistinct; as a destination, it comes and goes.
I imagine that I am in a big bubble floating through space. It is hard to imagine the darkness beyond, except at night when the ocean’s color, no longer generated by light from the sun, slips to gray and then black, is ominous, engulfing, as one might imagine the womb before birth. I experience anxiety. I’m anxious for the light to return. Behind me, houses glow, but before me is a void. We are so small, so insignificant.
Water reminds me of this, and this view comforts and frightens me. Fear comes from being unable to control water, and until I remember that I have no control, I continually fight the waves, trying to keep my feet on the ground. Better to relinquish control and move with the water, up and down, in and out, moved and held. Better to experience the power of that push and pull as part of the self. Best not to try and control it, better to recognize that I am part of it.