Nina Zurier
In conjunction with the exhibition My Certain Fate at Pharmaka in LA, curator Timothy Buckwalter interviewed Nina Zurier about her work process.
http://timothybuckwalter.typepad.com/painting_drawings/2009/04/nina-zurier.html
Zurier's glimpses: With his recent opening of Room for Painting, Room for Paper, San Francisco painter George Lawson became a gallerist and has set about showing the work of friends and others he admires.
In the gallery's second pair of shows, which ends today, Joseph Hughes' color-thatched abstract paintings make a characteristically authoritative and handsome impression. But most of the surprise comes in the way that photographer Nina Zurier fills the Room for Paper.
Everything functions here: the changing sizes and shapes of the pictures, their shifting eye line and staccato grouping, and their ever-varying sense of purpose and content.
Some, such as "Costa Brava" (2004) and "Wainscott 7" (2002/05), appear abstract. Others, such as "Vamlingbo 218" (2007), a shot of an enameled gray chair with an unusual trefoil back, made to look like a stolen glance by hazy focus, have the intrigue of carefully chosen cinema stills.
"Visby 521" (2007) - a scattering of broken and rotting pears on gray pavement - suggests notation of a bit of reality that seemed to present itself as a "readymade" formalist exercise.
Throughout, Zurier's photographs muse on the relations between pictures of reality and the reality of pictures, with aesthetic intensity as a connecting thread.
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/19/DDTE14QOD1.DTL
Nina Zurier
Recent Photographs
For the second show in the room for paper, I feel fortunate to be able to work with Bay Area photographer Nina Zurier, coming fresh off her major exhibition in the San Marco Gallery at the Dominican University in San Rafael. Over the past several years, Nina has garnered a well deserved reputation as a colorist, and color is indeed central to her expression. With this modest selection of works, I would like to draw attention as well to her accomplishment as an iconic artist, a maker of arresting and memorable images.
In the parlance of traditional photography, I might have described her as capturing an image rather than making it, but the introduction of archival inks to the digital print process has enabled a hybrid of photography and printmaking and Nina brings something of the ethic of the lithographer to her work on paper. Although she refers to her work simply as photography, the contribution to her image of the tactile surface of the paper itself is evidenced by her decision to show these works unframed. Her final image may or may not involve post production at the computer, but when she is shooting, she has in mind the matte, absorbent quality of large scale digital printing. This tactile focus, subtle though it may be, sets her apart from the established criteria photographers debate amongst one another over print quality and technique.
What I find remarkable is the depth of Nina Zurier's insight. I think this would hold true regardless of what medium she chose. She manages somehow to stay beneath the turbulence, keeping her vision as she moves seamlessly from the abstract to the specific, from an uninflected field of color to a portrait of a chair. Nina plays with time. Her work is as much about anticipation as about memory. It stretches boundaries. We begin to discover an unexpected cohesion when we compare works as initially diverse as the blue bomb of Berkeley 259 and the architectural symmetry Paimio 546, and in so doing, we begin to make entry into a remarkable world view.
George Lawson, Director
room for painting room for paper
Nina Zurier: Color in Focus
Nina Zurier is an artist of both range and depth. Her forms are sometimes identifiable, sometimes abstract, but these large format color photographs are always anchored in the world around us. “I am interested in how much (or how little) object/subject/content is necessary for each image to transcend documentation and yet still offer some form of representation of the physical world,” Zurier says of her work.
As for the objects she chooses to photograph, her main criterion is color. This can be a color that is close to no color at all, as in the haunting Vamlingbo 418 or the hallucinatory diptych, Drottningholm 027, which seems to incorporate its own retinal afterimage. “When I am taking pictures,” she says, “it is mostly about color and composition, leaving room for chance. But as the photo of the yellow pears [Visby 521] shows, I do occasionally choose to show things in detail when it suits my purpose—here the composition is still quite flat, and the color would not have been as strong if the focus were softer.”
The value Zurier places on drawing viewers into her creative process is signaled by her insistence that we be able to sense “that the image was made through a lens.” And, as George Lawson notes, Zurier values the immediacy and physicality of the paper she uses. She shows her prints without the protection of glass, so that their color is totally available. She also likes to push the normal limits of her camera’s auto-mode settings: “Most photographers bracket exposure—I also bracket focus. And then there are the wonderful accidents, like the big yellow truck passing by just as I was taking a photo out of the car window of something now forgotten [Phyamaa 270].”
Zurier’s willingness to let chance determine outcome inflects her exploration of color. The resulting images manage to be simultaneously lush and poignant. The mysteriously compelling Paimio 546, for example, attracts attention sensually and then holds it emotionally. For me, its seductive quality has something to do with the intense green of the grass, the light/dark/color pattern of the triplet windows, and the texture of that white wall relentlessly pulled into relief by raking sunlight. Clearly, the sensual and emotional resonance of this work and others in the exhibition is born of an engagement with the visual world, an engagement so intense it sometimes feels like love.
Jacquelynn Baas