CLAIRE SEIDL High Street Gallery Please click images above for full view. Claire Seidl has been described as a painter with a camera. The Maine/New York artist's first solo exhibit in Portland features her evocative, emotionally intense, silver gelatin & giclee prints. The exhibit of large-format and medium-size images chronicles everyday life at the family camp on Rangeley Lake. Seidl has summered in Maine for 21 years. Intriguing, mysterious and complex, the time-lapsed photographs present the ordinary as unique and compelling. The Rangeley Photographs I have been an abstract painter my entire adult life but over the last ten years I have also become a serious photographer. I started shooting pictures in and around an old camp in the mountains of western Maine, wanting to make art in nature but not to render landscapes or to depict flora and fauna. I wanted to communicate what I experienced in nature, in the woods, at night. That kind of experience and the resulting photographic images can feel like a flash of memory, a moment held more internally than describable. People, mostly family, inhabit and escape from the frame of the camera, but the photographs seem to suggest a human presence, with or without figures in them. The viewer steps into this space, filling an absence as if crossing a threshold. Often, during long exposures, people become ghostlike as their movements are recorded over time. I am very interested in how we see (or don't see) what is right in front of us. The camera can hold more visual information, especially over time, than we can. It can hold multiple layers of space and reflections in focus while we can only perceive one at a time. It can reveal what we can't see in darkness or burn images on film over time that we can't hold onto with our limited visual memory. The camera assists me in my obsession with the permutations of the act of looking. Claire Seidl resume High Street Gallery Congress Street Gallery current exhibits contact home