Amy Theiss Giese
Light in Sound: Concealed at first at last I appear

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Artist Statement:

Enter the room. Captured light, both its absence and excess, is arrested as hanging scrolls on the walls. There is a compression of time and space encapsulated in these impressions that references the constant, ongoing emergence of the past, which can never fully materialize. Shadows are stilled, seized, lost. The shifting shades of gray move across the surface. Patterns repeat, shapes emerge then recede, sometimes revealing their referent, other times remaining elusive. Collapsing three dimensions into a two dimensional translation. Then a physical manifestation of the time lost is returned; faint sounds build, moments where it all seems recognizable, then the tones shift, drift and move away. The sounds of a space, in a space, expand over time, the time referenced in the shadows. Awareness that there may be a correlation between what is seen and what is heard. The experience sits just at the edge of abstraction, asking the viewer to question what they see, what they hear, how they relate to one another, and how surroundings are perceived.

The images are photograms of shadows cast in a room at night at 56 Arbor Street and the sound is a digital translation of those images, from pixels to MIDI notes. Embedded in each scroll is an abstracted compression of an experience, yet they simultaneously hold the direct reference to the actual space and time—light written, recorded by an alchemical process. The sound is again an abstraction, a reinterpretation of the original experience through the filter of a visual understanding, and yet it too holds moments of a direct recording of the space itself. Both elements have an indexical relationship to the physical space of the building but do not actually depict the building itself. Rather, they evoke a sense of being in the building at this time, in this moment. We desire these recordings to be moments of truth, yet we simultaneously understand that the reproduction is never actually the same as the original. This is something fundamentally human, how we cope and attempt to understand our place in relation to others, our perception of our own unique realities.

About the Artist:

Amy Theiss Giese completed her MFA in Photography with honors at Parsons in NYC in 2009, and is now teaching part-time at the New England School of Photography in Boston, MA. Always present in her work is a questioning of how we see and how the camera "sees" - she has effectively used overlapping images, in-camera distortion and photograms to subtly question what is a photograph, how do photographs relate to reality and how do we respond to photographic images today given the history of the medium and its current role in society. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, the Danforth Museum, the Visual Arts Center of NJ, Arnold & Sheila Aronson Gallery in NYC and the Sydney College of the Arts galleries.

STEP UP 2010 is made possible with the generous support of Real Art Ways Members, the National Endowment for the Arts, Sandy and Howard Fromson, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, the Nimoy Foundation, the National Performance Network's Visual Artists Network, Lincoln Financial Group, Travelers and Greater Hartford Arts Council's United Arts Campaign.