Portia Munson’s Flower Mandala’s will be exhibited alongside Jared Handelsman’s moonlight landscape photograms and bound rock sculptures. 

 

Portia Munson began creating flower images in 2002 after the death of a favorite person left her pondering the fleeting lives of flowers and people. “While walking in my garden images of flower arrays came to me. Using the mandala, the circular form that represents the universe, I meticulously arrange flowers from the garden into combinations of flower and form.” Munson’s images are made using a flatbed scanner like a large-format camera, then printing the captured images on rag paper with archival inks. In some of her images dead birds (found along local road or in front of plate glass windows) are incorporated into the mandalas, creating memento mori’s, memorializing the birds. With this work Munson is recording a specific moment in time, showing what was in bloom on the day it was made, while illuminating our problematic ecological impact.

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Jared Handelsman’s camera-less photographs are made by exposing silver emulsion photo paper to moonlight shadows cast in the landscape. Exhibited photos include moonlight shadows of a pear tree, a crabapple, a blackberry thicket, blueberry bushes, sunflowers and wildflowers. These black and white photos are toned with Ektacolor photo inks.

Handelsman’s Bound Rocks are rocks that he has bound together with wire and are inspired by reading C.G.Jung’s “The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche”. In his essay Jung describes how the Psyche’s force of habit is challenged by a changing environment. For Jung the Psyche is fragile by design so that it can easily fracture and if it is able, adopts an attitude and a renewed sense of self as a complex that is held together in an integrated fragmentation.

 

Portia Munson and Jared Handelsman live in the outskirts of Catskill NY where

they share an old barn studio. They have been creating works in the landscape surrounding their home since the early 1990’s.

Psychedelic Landscape describes Portia and Jared’s experience of closely observing the living landscape surrounding their home, which is so alive, active and always changing!