Kim Kauffman - Beyond the Lens: Cameraless Photo-Collage - Cameraless images are as old as photography itself, begun in the mid-1800s with Henry Fox Talbot's photogenic drawings and Anna Atkin's studies of mosses and algae. The form has continued outside the mainstream of photography to the present day. Kim Kauffman embraces this tradition using modern tools and techniques. For the past eleven years Kauffman has combined cameraless recording of her subjects and photo-collage. With this process a new surreal visual world based upon an exploration of light, color, texture and scale emerges in these superbly sharp and sensuously soft images.

 

This exhibition combines three ongoing bodies of work: Florilegium, Collaborations and Illumitones. Their common thread is Kauffman's singular vision that explores abstraction of the subject. Florilegium combines flowers, leaves, seedpods collected from gardens. Many are past their prime -- the stages of growth and decay depicted in these images re-create life's rhythms and dramas. Collaborations builds from Florilegium combining natural and synthetic elements to examine the forms that nature repeats across all things and how we humans mimic these forms in our designs. Illumitones takes abstraction further as the subject becomes a vehicle for organic and geometric studies of light and shadow, line and form -- distilling the intrinsic elements of the human endeavor of making art.