LORNA BIEBER NATURAL WORLD

By Christopher Jones

The Ringling will present a solo focus exhibition of works by Lorna Bieber in May that includes two new pieces making their debut in the Keith D. and Linda L. Monda Gallery for Contemporary Art. Bieber’s artwork first and foremost encourages us to indulge in the pleasures of looking and discovering anew the details of the visual world.

Bieber’s artistic practice is grounded in the principles of appropriating, recycling, and manipulating imagery. Her process involves painting on or collaging images, then rephotographing them to make them appear as seamless, if surreal, compositions. She discovered that banal, discardable images could become reenchanted through photographic means, such as amplifying detail into mammoth proportions or making grand objects small and intimate. The pictures she creates often appear as if they were artifacts from the looking-glass world of photographic images. In this uncanny landscape, we find overlooked or trivial images elevated to the stature of allegory or archetype. Bieber is less interested in representing the world mimetically than in discovering visual touchstones that seem to emerge directly from our shared consciousness.

Bieber’s most recent work over the past decade has become increasingly monumental and process-oriented. These massive works, which she calls her Montage series, take up vast sections of wall, but are made from small graphic fragments painstakingly woven together. One of the first of these, Tapestry (2015), will be on display as part of the exhibition. It consists of a dense array of butterflies, flowers, and other photographic spolia of the natural world that Bieber gleaned and manipulated using a copier machine. As if assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle, she carefully considers the placement of each element, sizing and resizing when necessary, and seeks to create an overall visual harmony of parts relating to the whole. The process

PREVIOUS SPREAD: typically takes a year or two to complete. Once finished, she digitally photographs the work and has it produced on canvas, connecting her practice to the medieval tradition of tapestries and textile wall-hangings.

In just the past few years, Bieber has further developed her methodology for making her Montages to include images that she herself takes on her iPhone, and she has also expanded from her black and white compositions into using a new palette of color. The Ringling will be debuting her two newest works, Ordinary Day (2019) and Quiet Night (2022), both of which demonstrate the evolution of Bieber’s process. In each of these engrossing artworks, buildings and structures emerge from an entanglement of dreamlike flora, much as memories emerge into consciousness. As viewers, our field of vision is overwhelmed by the scale and detail of the work, and our eyes can only apprehend small details and sections at a time. The artist likens this to stitching together a fragmented narrative without a discernible beginning or end.

Lorna Bieber’s work reminds us of the image world that inundates our daily existence. Our experience of reality is mediated through a barrage of photographic digital images that supplants our connection to the natural world. Yet, Bieber is less interested in a critique of this condition than she is in offering her work as an antidote, a way to inspire viewers and reconnect with our shared sense of wonder.

THIS SPREAD, ABOVE:

Lorna Bieber, Tapestry (detail), 2014-2016. Hannemuhle canvas and Ultrachrome II inks, 132 x 249 in.