As an artist, I draw on my affinity for the natural world to create visual metaphors that represent personal and universal narratives of loss, absence and transformation. By using organic specimens from the land in various stages of the life cycle, I am referring to the topography of the psychic terrain as well. Each image reveals a passionate story of the inner life.
The series Vanitas and Immaculate Memory use a flatbed scanner as camera to photograph small-scale environments scanned at high resolutions. The scanning surface functions as an abridged studio space on which two- and three-dimensional objects are composed as a "still life". Viewed larger-than-life as prints, these modest scenes seduce the viewer with intimate details, textures and colors. The high-fidelity image is captured in a way that exploits the scanner’s shallow sense of space and mimics the atmospheric glow of Dutch Golden Era paintings.
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Alison Hahn Buzek recently left a teaching position as Assistant Professor of Photography at Minnesota State University, Moorhead to get married and relocate to San Diego with her husband, a US Navy diver. She is originally from Houston, Texas and received her MFA in Photography from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, a small university town north of Dallas with great music and abundant art. While exploring the environs near her home in Moorhead, she delightfully discovered the similarity between the flora and fauna of Northwest Minnesota and her home state, as areas of both regions embody the beautiful prairies and big sky of North America’s Great Plains.