– Versione italiana a pagina 2 –
Pure Semblance originates as a skillful experiment by the artist Rosie Clements, who, in addition to photography, also engages in sculpture and printmaking.
While attending graduate school, she began experimenting in the university’s lab with a small Roland UV printer, a type of printer that uses ultraviolet light to cure ink as soon as it is applied to a surface.
However, all her photographs, reproduced on various surfaces, turned out to be either completely unreadable or, at times, too comprehensible and decipherable.
It wasn’t until she started printing on a sheet of bubble wrap, which she found by chance, that the images bearing her signature were born—a blend of experimentation, serendipity, and creative flair.
These are material and, at the same time, incorporeal images, where shapes and colours settle on those sheets, adapting to the undulations between the filled and empty spaces, offering a perfect balance between reality and fleeting unreality. These are intangible images, which we imagine to be soft, to be touched delicately to confirm their tangible concreteness.
“… The bubbles reminded me of soft and tactile pixels. I was drawn to how the details sat atop the bubbles rather than in the spaces between them, meaning the works are only readable from the right angle or distance, and up close, they are almost entirely abstract.”
Just as that polyethylene sheet with air bubbles, often discarded after a single use, adapts perfectly to protect fragile objects by reproducing their shapes, in this case, it also reflects the fleeting nature of digital images, which are often easily shared and even more quickly forgotten in our fast-paced, media-saturated world.
Those air bubbles that live within the limited space allotted to them here transform into pixels that, fused into a single image, reproduce with a halo of evanescent poetry the reality experienced, analyzed, and transformed, as always, by human ingenuity.
Rosie Clements, who began her career as a traditional photographer, in her more recent works creates digital photographs and reconstitutes them as physical objects, testing the increasingly blurred boundaries between the material and the virtual. She has exhibited her work throughout Texas, where she lives and works, including her first solo exhibition in 2024 at the McLennon Pen Co. in Austin, TX. Her works have been published in numerous industry magazines, including BOOOOOOOM, Southwest Contemporary, Dazed, andIt’s Nice That. Rosie was also included in Lenscratch’s “26 to Watch” list in 2023, which annually celebrates and supports the new generation of young photographic artists.”
