Nicole Landau
Nicole Landau
Respara Installation
Artist Statement
“I always start with photographs of aged architectural elements. The original photographs may be used whole, repeated, or deconstructed, blended one upon another, forms ultimately emerging through translucency, imparting depth and light. Its inherent patterns reveal a common object is transformed into previously unimagined landscapes. My Portals series began with a dream: I drew a circle in the sky with my finger, and the stars aligned around it. I kept doing it repeatedly in disbelief as the stars continued to jump into place. Although this was only a dream, I believe it says something about our primal connection with the circles we see all around us: our sun, the full moon, the constellations arcing overhead, cycles of birth, life, regeneration…the certainty of completion when a circle has closed. This is why I continually explore the circular form in the Portals series. These ”portals” seem doorways to resonance realms, both ancient and new, unexplored and intimately familiar.
My newest series, Temples of Time, plays with the visual harmony inherent in the Tripartite Schema found throughout history in art, religion, and classical architecture. In the most basic way, each piece in the series has three vertical sections and three horizontal, with a third axis of depth implied through layering, creating a coherent nested relationship between parts and the whole. The Three: Body, Soul, and Spirit, expressed through sacred geometry. I see this series at once as a ray of light breaking over high mountains and as a perspectival view deep into the mountain range. The art is presented as grey, but upon closer inspection, it is clearly, if subtly, infused with color. The Temples of Time works to provide a place of peace and reflection – a Temple, a primordial echo through the mountains of creation, a place where the threads of life collide and interweave. For all this, the Temples of Time derive their imagery from my photographs of gates that line back alleys or auto body shops. I thus realize an unlikely transformation by turning what goes unnoticed, discarded, or considered unsightly into a transcendent space.”
