PHOTOGRAPHY

Momentum

Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA 

Vadden Sea, Danemark 

       

Momentum means both “moment” and “impulse.”

Sitting on this rock, taking this path

With this series, Patricia Erbelding continues her obsessive tendency to return almost always to the same place. Beyond the grandeur of the landscape, the photographer reveals above all its stillness.

This stillness, however, is only superficial. For beneath this apparent inertia, nothing is frozen; everything is in motion, and matter is transformed by natural forces.

In the south, in Bryce Canyon, Utah, in the United States, nothing seems to move on these rocky plateaus—privileged vantage points from which to gaze down into the valley.

In the north, on the shores of the Wadden Sea in Denmark, the landscape is constantly changing as the sea gains or loses ground, inviting us or pushing us back, as it pleases.

What connects these two worlds—one mineral, the other aquatic—is a natural force: water. Water that carves out the canyon and shapes this virtiginous geology, the architect of our ancestors’ land, populated by trees that are almost fossils, seemingly forever clinging to the rocks.

Water, too, which engulfs the land we walk upon, erasing with each tide our path lined with stunted trees, only to open it up again, free of all traces, like an invitation to journey.

Momentum draws us into our world, as if into a dream that illuminates our relationship with time.

If we linger long enough to gaze at the landscape, we will see the mountains move, and we will move with them.

L'Instantanée Gallery

Interstates

 

"Sans souci, Arizona"

PWP third prize award by Juror Mary Ellen Mark

Group show at .NO Gallery, 251 East Houston Street, NY, NY,USA

May 9th - 27th, Wednesdays through Sundays, 1-6 PM. 

and online gallery on PWP's website, www.pwponline.org

March 1-August 31, 2012.

from "Interstates" series - Film-based photography

I began the “Interstates” series of pictures when I first travelled in the USA in the beginning of the 2000 and it remains work in progress, a travel through space and time, like a never ending road movie.

I’m fascinated by what’s left of the Googie architecture that mixed aerodynamic shapes and flashy colors supposed to attract the drivers’ attention. These are old constructions like gas stations, motels, restaurants, bars or bowling alleys that you can find along american roads, as many remainders of an architectural style that developed in the fifties and sixties, inspired by automobile and space ship aesthetic. Today, a few of those places are left, kept decaying by the desert, but with a visible coat of the past.

I crossed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada (Death Valley) to find them. From the road, I took pictures of architectures and landscapes, often situated near the borders between two states. There is no human presence on the photographs, it seems the places have been abandoned or maybe, invaded by the desert you can sense behind each road, each building.

Travel associated with photography is a way for me to catch this present time, transient between the past with this « déjà vu » feeling that evokes the “on the road again” spirit of the sixties and a future we can imagine as a vast no-man’s land.