Rhoda Rosenfeld, Geobiology, from the Maps of the World series, 1970-73 (BG6434).
Artwork
Geobiology, from the Maps of the World series
- Artist/Creator
- Rhoda Rosenfeld (Artist)
- Date
- 1970-73
- ID #
- BG6434
Physical Description
- Medium
- gelatin silver print
- Support
- paper
- Dimensions
- Object Description
- Geobiology is part of the Maps of the World series which began when the artist accidentally damaged a roll of film that had been stored in a bag during a hot and humid summer. The iconography, which began from photographs taken of Long Beach on Vancouver Island and arrived at metaphorical landscape, simultaneously shows the micro and macro mappings of a familiar and foreign terrain.
Of the Maps of the World series, Rhoda Rosenfeld wrote in November 2020:
“Maps of the World started with a roll of negatives (among 25 others) that I’d been keeping in a plastic envelope in the summer of 1970. I spent the summer living in a hut (a sauna bath) on Long Beach on Vancouver Island. When I got back to the city and started to develop the negatives, this one, as I stood in the darkroom reeling it onto the spool, felt damp and sticky but I decided to develop it anyway. So this iconography arrived purely by chance and blew my mind for a long time with its metaphorical messages. Keith Wallace described it most perfectly, I think, in an essay he wrote for a show of paintings I had at the Contemporary Art Gallery in 1992: ;The intended pictures of sandy beaches, rolling surf and flocks of birds lay obscured behind a screen of ghostly biomorphic shapes, the after-effect of a chemical transformation in the photographic emulsion. Visually, these shapes vacillated between the microscopic and the macroscopic, between lesion-like body scars and aerial mappings of the earth shot from outer space.”
The photographs were exhibited in the poets have always preceded at Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver, 26 January-27 April 2019. They were written about by Bill Jeffries in Arbora Versa, the essay for the 1990 exhibition and by Keith Wallace in Dark Works, the essay for the 1992 exhibition, both at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
History
- Collection
- Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Permanent Collection
- Credit Line
- Gift of the artist, 2024
- Related Exhibitions
- –
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