Aug 24

Cheryl Maeder

Written by Kristen T. Woodward, curator, MFA, professor of art, Albright College.

A conceptual photographer and video installation artist, Cheryl Maeder has exhibited her environmentally focused work extensively in the United States and Europe for over two decades. Her projects of international scope include a traveling group exhibition curated by Arts Connection Foundation, sharing her work with audiences in Bogota, Caracas, Valencia, Miami, Santo Domingo, San Nicolas and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The Portal, a collection of Cheryl’s video installations, was successfully installed at John F. Kennedy New York, Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale International Airports. Recently, her work was notably featured in the Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary Art Fair, the Miami New Media Festival, and at Cornell Art Museum. She was also recently shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Award’s Alpha Female Award.

The large format photographic landscapes often feature intrusions of intense fuchsia, red and yellow clouds on open seas, suggesting an amorphous but interloping human presence in otherwise pristine waters. The origins and substance of the colored fogs are unknown, but invite scrutiny into otherwise idyllic spaces. When human figures are included in her photographic series such as La Mer, Cloud Nine, Far and Away, and others, color relationships similarly vacillate in stark contrast between the natural and artificial. In some cases, artifice serves as a vehicle for the supernatural, or the profoundly sublime.

Voyage triptych (pictured above) paradoxically dots dozens of small figures with brightly colored innertubes against verdantly green swimming holes. Crisply focused edges tilt the piece towards surrealism, as bathers’ saturated swimsuits stand apart from overgrown algae and lush grass. While there’s a sense of crowded intrusion in several of these scenes, there’s also a pleasurable mix of texture and lurid color. Another series of photographs entitled Submerge continues the artist’s progression from the macrocosmic to microcosmic, with close up views of individual swimmers. These closer views, however, don’t afford us with more information as her swimmers are abstracted by their submersion- forming brief flashes of vibrant color and flesh against surfaces disturbed by choppy waves. Easy to see the linkage between these still photographs and Cheryl’s videos, which animate whirling movements and vocalizations against natural sounds of rushing and bubbling waters.

Submerge (pictured above), a short two-minute film of a lone swimmer, explores basic and primal relationships between human beings and water. A female subject in a blue floral suit repeatedly curls into a fetal position from a supine float, creating associations with embryonic fluid and dreams. Transitions between poses include brief fades, and at times the figure appears to dissolve completely against a slightly pixelated color field. Several pieces within the series possess a high degree of abstraction. Submerge I, a large digital photograph on paper appears to be a still image 01:41 minutes into the film. Compositionally, the piece forgoes the intense color palette of other frames containing the swimmer as her bathing suit melts into refracted water droplets. A shape of dark hair just below the surface remains her only distinguishing feature. The effect reveals a nude body almost completely obscured by ripples in shallow water. The brash blue suggests a pool rather than a natural body, and so the human form unexpectedly flips to play the role of the natural against the artificial in the piece.

Cheryl Maeder’s enduring formal and conceptual concerns with ecology and landscape evoke essential biological connections and weave together the profane with the unexpected. She frames humanity’s break from nature through a language and lens of diverging color, and as such, unassuming beach scenes speak to deeper fissures. She asks us to contemplate our elemental link to living waters, and how we now shape our ties to the earth. Taken together, her video installations and still photographs build a philosophical purpose as well as transcend the individual experience to arrive at collective, universal beauty.