Judith Belzer
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Judith Belzer
It might not look that way, but this new work originates inside a tree. Over the last few years my studio explorations have led from an up-close examination of wood and its grain patterning to some broader considerations of pattern, scale and perspective. Images based on the configurations in a random piece of wood could evoke, I found, not just woodiness or trees but also designs and structures observed elsewhere in the natural world at close range (water droplets, sand grooves, minerals, feathers, DNA strands), or at a longer range (mountain ranges, canyons, river valleys), as well as, and perhaps more surprisingly, patterns emerging from our cultural creations (the urban grid, parceled agricultural lands, maps, architectural constructions). Shuttling between a micro and a macro scale while using a shifting perspective, the work has shed a literal context in order to explore certain ambiguities in the way we experience the world. Is what I’m looking at animal, vegetable or mineral? Am I looking through the lens of a microscope, from the windshield of an airplane cockpit, at a computer-generated landscape or an object in the palm of my hand? The paintings employ the language of drawing to delve into the visual continuities between such disparate things as a chunk of rotting oak tree, a bacteria cell division, a massive granite outcropping, and a freeway interchange. What emerges from this inquiry is a through line linking the organizing principles of both the natural and built environment.
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