Foto Relevance is excited to announce Sky Light, a solo exhibition by artist Brenda Biondo. Marking Biondo’s second solo show at Foto Relevance, Sky Light will debut selections from the artist’s two newest bodies of work: Rayleigh Shadows and A Legacy of Shadows. Both portfolios serve as natural expansions of Biondo’s longstanding fascination with perceptions of high-altitude light and color as they relate to and interact with the environment at large. Underscoring this curiosity is a desire for viewers to take note of the natural world—and to consider how it continues to uplift and inspire us despite its imperiled state. Sky Light will be on view at the gallery from November 20th, 2020 through February 12th, 2021.
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Rayleigh Shadows
"The series Rayleigh Shadows examines the physical properties of sunlight and our perception of light and landscape."
Brenda Biondo
Building on the oeuvre of Light and Space artists known for encouraging audiences to experience the physics of light in unique ways, Rayleigh Shadows draws from the scientific concept of “Rayleigh scattering" (which informs why the sky is blue). The series brings to life how shadows—particularly those at high altitudes—can be quite variable in color because of scattering's effect on sunlight's blue wavelengths. The results are shadows quietly tinged with color, ranging in tonality from blue-grey to purple. Demonstrating these soft nuances by first casting shadows on white paper that has been rolled, cut, and/or folded and then photographing the results straight as they lie, Biondo artistically chronicles the transformation of light and shadow as they fall on intervening surfaces, yielding pensive abstractions steeped in scientific thought.
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"The angles of the paper dictate the color and luminosity of the shadows. Each final image is a single traditional photograph with no post-production manipulation or color alteration."
Brenda Biondo
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A Legacy of Shadows
"A Legacy of Shadows is a series of photographs concerned with the fracturing of nature and the poignancy of acknowledging beauty in a time of destruction."
Brenda Biondo
A Legacy of Shadows takes the visual experimentation of Rayleigh Shadows a step further, applying it to document the artist’s outside environment through abstract flora shadows and subtle textures. Employing the same process as before, Biondo takes to the outdoors, placing sheets of white paper on the bare or snow-covered ground and photographing how shadows cast by trees and other parts of the landscape materialize on these introduced elements. In effect, the artist deconstructs the Colorado landscapes she inhabits, leaving viewers with indirect glimpses of distorted beauty that linger even as our natural world contends with its own disintegration.
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"The images reference our efforts to control and constrain nature, while revealing parts of the natural world we often overlook.
By focusing on the shadows rather than on the plants themselves, the work alludes to the greatly diminished state of the natural world – a world that is essentially a shadow of its former self."
Brenda Biondo
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Also On View
Selections from Moving Pictures, Modalities, and Remnants & RevivalIn Moving Pictures, Biondo takes printed photographs of the sky that have been physically folded and/or cut, and rephotographs them in motion in front of actual skyscapes and landscapes. The result is an abstract image that blends and merges together real and reproduced imagery of the natural world. In Modalities, the artist creates digital montages sourced from hundreds of images captured during the creation of the Moving Pictures series and its preceding portfolio Paper Skies, engaging in a process of re-imagining and re-contextualizing her previous work into graphic-like visuals. In one of her earliest explorations into the landscape, Remnants & Revival, Biondo crafts elegant diptychs of plants and the environments in which they grow.
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Brenda Biondo (American, b. 1963) is a Colorado photographer who uses traditional camera techniques and a formalist aesthetic to explore the perception of high-altitude light and color and their role in the construct of landscape. Her work emphasizes the use of unconventional contexts to create new ways of looking at common subjects, while challenging viewers' perception of color and three-dimensional space. Her interest in atmospheric phenomena and other components of the natural world is built on a foundation of concern for environmental and conservation issues.
Brenda's work has been exhibited throughout the country and published in numerous print and online publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Denver Post and Lenscratch. Her photographs are held in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography and the San Diego Museum of Art. A solo exhibit of her work opened at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2017.
Her first book of photographs, Once Upon a Playground, was published by the University Press of New England in 2014 and is now the subject of a five-year traveling exhibit organized by ExhibitsUSA. Her second book, American Ferret, focuses on endangered species and will be published in early 2021.
A native New Yorker, she’s been a resident of Colorado since 1999, and currently lives in a small town near Pikes Peak where the light and landscape continue to inspire her work.
