571 Projects is pleased to announce Visions, an exhibition of new mixed media monoprints and emulsion transfers by accomplished artist Dorothy Simpson Krause. This is Krause' first show with the gallery. She is a painter, collage artist and printmaker who incorporates digital mixed media into her art. Her work is exhibited regularly in galleries and museums and featured in numerous current periodicals and books.
In this new body of work, Krause explores the surreal through images of abandoned and submerged worlds: thresholds combined with imagery of leaves and branches reflected on the surface of a pool of water. Taking inspiration from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s haunting poem, “Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment” (1797), written after an opium-laced dream of an exotic and opulent palace, Krause’s work highlights the mystery of architectural space and light: doorways, windows, and hallways from which light either shines or recedes into blackness. Ethereal and menacing, her work conveys the poetry of space and light, alluding to spiritual transitions, and ultimately, life and death. As in Coleridge’s poem, beauty is underscored with violence, potential and real. These abandoned passages appear to be submerged below the reflective surface of water like the shifting memory of dreams, but also a statement about the impending disappearance of civilization as we know it, through the effects of global warming.
Working at a crossroads between cutting-edge digital processes and traditional methods, Krause is a pioneer in the use of digital media in art making, while maintaining her roots as a painter and collage artist. For one series in this body of work she uses a process that resembles Polaroid emulsion transfer. In another series she transfers monoprints onto uniquely prepared surfaces such as fresco, brushed aluminium, non-woven fabric, or silver leaf.
in her own words_
I began this series thinking of portals - both grand and imposing entrances and creative or technological gateways to other realms. The initial photographs, taken over many years in Tibet, Puerto Rico, Egypt, Sicily, etc., took on an otherworldly quality as I recalled the haunting words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn." Written after an opium-induced dream, his poem, subtitled "A Vision in a Dream, a Fragment," seemed to fit both conceptual frameworks.
The resulting images reflect both the light and the darkness of Coleridge's vision in a series of submerged architectural fragments. To emphasize the fragility of the images, some were produced as monoprints transferred to rough fresco surfaces or to reflective surfaces such as metallic painted non-woven fabric, aluminum and silver leaf. A small edition of emulsion transfers enhanced the feel of flowing water with their characteristic rippling edges.
Finally to complete the body of work, I took details from the series and created four 24 x 24 in. lenticular prints, "Fragments." As the viewer moves past, each six inch square alternates between two details, creating the illusion of a shifting, shimmering kaleidoscopic array - as if buildings and trees are being glimpsed through the rushing waters of a cataclysmic onslaught.
