NAME: cecilia schmidt
BIRTH PLACE:
BIOGRAPHY
Cecilia Schmidt has exhibited her work in New York, Arizona, New Mexico, and Germany. Her current work is mainly in photography. She has also collaborated on site-specific public works with architects, and her design was chosen as a finalist in the New England Holocaust Memorial Competition in Boston, Massachusetts.
The New York, NY images are from a series of photographs, called Real Birds that I take from nature programming on television.
In some cases, the images are of rare birds most of us will never see, or migrating birds that accomplish amazing feats and go great distances to mate or find food, an increasingly difficult task given human destruction of their habitat and environment.
These migrating birds of the skies continue their journey from the original filmmakers who documented their journeys, to an audience of millions who watch them on television, to these small edition or one-of-a-kind photographs.
I am interested in the proliferation of images of nature, made possible by photography, but taken to an exploded extreme by digital technology. There is an illusion of boundless, free nature, which occurs in the non-space of digital technology, in contrast to an acceleration of the destruction of nature by human activity.
These images are a visual exploration of the artificiality of this endless transmission of digital imagery of a finite and disappearing subject.
The images from Littered Landscapes are tableux that I construct with paint and found objects. I think of them as poems of dislocation, loss and illusion; and an investigation into the photograph's role as an instrument of truth.
