Susan Mikula’s photographic series shed light on the elements of physical surroundings that do not normally demand the limelight. The commonplace, the unimportant, the unnoticed or the ignored – part remembered and part forgotten – are imbued with feeling and meaning.  Side by side, each series has its own distinct pictorial qualities, yet each is infused with Mikula’s unique ability to photographically “paint” abstractions of the real world around us, and so to connect with the world within us.

sic transit is a group of contemplative photos that lead the viewer through corridors, passageways and hallways – transitory places through which we would normally rush on our way to our destination.  Rather than employ them as settings or backgrounds, Mikula turns them into subject matter.  Blurred bursts of light inhabit and animate each scene. Although we are aware that it is sourced from somewhere outside, this light transforms itself into the virtual source of radiance emanating from the picture itself. When seen in the large-format Duraflex prints she chose for their first public display, the effect is even more striking. The stillness of these pieces invites us to dwell while we are contemporaneously transported into the realm of the mind.  As such, the images become visual metaphors of the psychological spaces through which we travel.  At the same time, they are like bridges to the spaces where we might experience our own dreams, memories, feelings or emotions.

In contrast, the Pier 40 series beckons the viewer to focus on the actual, to notice the unnoticed.  If the sic transit series reveals the reaction of time with light in space, the Pier 40 series records how time and light has reacted on man made surfaces.  Training her camera on the details, Mikula invites us to see through the lens of her abstraction the beauty of aging, rust and decay. These images are like mementos, or less romantically, like evidentiary photos, documenting the aftermath of activities and events past and unknown, leaving us to wonder what, or who, left these marks.  Certainly we are aware that the images are real, yet we simultaneously appreciate them inventively, focusing on the formal qualities of line, shape, texture, light and shade, and the revelation of the aesthetic and emotional depth they contain.

In the Kidder Farm series, we can see Mikula shift from the spaces we inhabit to the light that inhabits our space.  In this series, the imagery yields to an abstracted vision that portrays the evanescence of light.  A warm and luminous energy takes center stage, wrapped in a glow of photographic chiaroscuro created by a mixture of movement, time and light.  When capturing these images, Mikula holds the shutter of her camera open for longer than usual, allowing it to draw in the surrounding light while she moves the camera’s point of view.  She traces her movements and the movements of the light as it travels through darkness, leaving behind its embers.  By manipulating the camera, an apparatus whose original purpose was to replicate the static visible world, Mikula evokes its opposite: the dynamic luminosity and atmospheric beauty of an intangible “invented” world.

Through these works, achieved with vintage Polaroid cameras and films, Mikula pushes the bounds of conventional photography.  Working only with available light, she overrides the camera’s shutter to control film exposure by feel, bracing the camera by hand, against her body, sometimes moving, sometimes still, while allowing light to flood in.  Mikula’s approach is raw, honest and unstaged, hearkening back to the strong emotion of the abstract expressionists and the contemplative depths of the minimalists, while drawing on the integration of the real with the abstract. Yet in the end, it is an aesthetic of her own creation, as she allows both time and light to have their say.

~ Kaye Mahoney

Each series of images was photographed over the course of a single day, using a vintage camera and film that’s no longer being produced. I override the automatic mechanism of the camera, forcing the shutter to stay open and receive the available light; holding the camera against my body to steady it.  In these resulting images of strange yet familiar places, my intent is to chart the passage of time, to blur the boundaries of time and space, light and place, artist and audience.

Yeats wrote, “The blue and the dim and the dark cloths / Of night and light and the half light” — I remember those lines like I was born from them. I’m obsessed with the passing of time and the way light changes. When I’ve done what I set out to accomplish in a photograph, I have preserved the skipping and floating and grinding of time. When it works — when time and light and my ideas align — I can see the tick-tick-tick of life moving, right there in a still image, a collection of moments. I can feel that time again and again and again.

The soft, dream-like familiarity of these perspectives is intended to allow you entry, taking you in as you take in the image — no frame, no boundary to the viewer, no sharp division between what I’ve seen and what you see now. Luminous, numinous, this could be our memory, or a vision out of our future, a message from some other world, absorbing and bouncing its unknowable light.

Previously best known for her portraiture and still-lifes, Susan Mikula’s recent work moves away from the representational. While retaining some pictorial elements, the work is increasingly abstract and monochromatic, rendering powerful images that connect on a visceral level.  “Mikula’s approach is raw, honest and unstaged, hearkening back to the strong emotion of the abstract expressionists and the contemplative depths of the minimalists … in the end, it is an aesthetic of her own creation, as she allows both time and light to have their say.”¹

She has also received acclaim for her landscapes, female nudes and supersized diptychs. Critics have described her photographic art as “alluring,” “full of ominous beauty,” “complex” and “arresting.” Using Polaroid cameras exclusively, she relies only on available light and never crops her finished work.

Most recently she has been featured in two group shows in California:

• Trans-Focus at the George Lawson Gallery/room for painting room for paper, San Francisco, CA (Sep 2009)
• Fall Inaugural Exhibition at the Shasta College Art Gallery, Redding, CA (Aug/Sep 2009)

Earlier in 2009 her work was included in two group shows at the Ferrin Gallery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts: “FRESH: New Art, New Artists” (May/June 2009) and “Women: Portrait + Figure” (March/April 2009) – and in the monograph “Susan Mikula, Photographs, 2008” published by Luxxus Press (Feb. 2009).

Upcoming solo shows include:

• “bearings” at TJ Walton Gallery, Provincetown, MA (Oct 2009)
• “American Device” at George Lawson Gallery/room for painting room for paper, San Francisco, CA (opening February 25, 2010)

Last December/January, in Chelsea, New York City, her solo show sic transit at the CHC Gallery featured three- and four-foot-square Duraflex prints, face-mounted to Plexiglas. In the introduction to the monograph, painter Kaye Mahoney writes of the sic transit series, “The commonplace, the unimportant, the unnoticed or the ignored—part remembered and part forgotten—are imbued with feeling and meaning … infused with Mikula’s unique ability to photographically paint abstractions of the real world around us, and so to connect with the world within us.  …they are like bridges to the spaces where we might experience our own dreams, memories, feelings or emotions.” ¹

During the Summer of 2007, Mikula’s disquieting photographic installation, titled omnivore, was on view at The Office of Senator Rosenberg in the Boston State House. Fifty Polaroid original photographs—landscapes, portraits, abstract images, and scary mean little animals—were printed on Melamine plastic dinner plates and organized into place settings of 2 to 11. “Plates are both classical—like The State House itself—and familiar as a form. The images are abstract but also accessible and touchable and domestic,” said Mikula.

In September 2006, Mikula was applauded for 9 Portraits, her unique installation of nine color Polaroid portraits printed on nine-foot-tall swathes of industrial mesh and spotlighted for two days in the Exhibition Hall of the Three County Fairgrounds in Northampton, Massachusetts. Reviewers described it thus: “The expansiveness of [her] exhibit, and the unlikely setting…challenge[s] the learned way of looking at art,”² “…Mikula’s artwork overwhelms you with gentle light, impressionistic color and half remembered moments…The impact is undeniable…”³

Other solo shows include still, moving pictures (2005), Civil Twilight (2003), New Beauty (2002), After Reprimand (2001) and Lux in Tenebris (1998).

In 2004, Mikula curated and exhibited in Viva! Polaroid, a group show featuring the experimentation and innovation of eleven New England photographers, on display at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Mikula’s work has also been shown at the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida; the San Diego Art Institute; St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in New York City; and State of the Arts ‘98 in Oregon. Her work has been selected for national juried exhibitions, and she is the recipient of three artist grants from The Northampton Cultural Council.

For more information about Susan Mikula, please go to susanmikula.com

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1. Essay, “Susan Mikula, Photographs, 2008” Luxxus Press (2009)
2. The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Massachusetts (9/25/06)
3. The Valley Advocate, Easthampton, Massachusetts (9/28/06)

Luxxus Press is pleased to announce the publication of “Susan Mikula, Photographs, 2008″ – a monograph of recent work released in conjunction with her NYC gallery show “sic transit”  at CHC Gallery in Chelsea.

Featuring sixteen color plates from the “sic transit” series, six from the “Pier 40″ series and five from the “Kidder Farm” series, this is the most recent of ten years of work created with modified Polaroid cameras and films, in which Mikula brings an almost 19th century technique to 20th century technology, to create a 21st century aesthetic all her own.

Mysterious yet familiar, Mikula’s images draw you in. The painter Kaye Mahoney writes in her introductory essay of how “the stillness of these pieces invites us to dwell while we are contemporaneously transported into the realm of the mind,” while poet Jill McDonough writes in her foreword of how the images feel “cinematic, almost recognizable … their softened edges end up feeling like a single line drawn a hundred times by a hundred different hands …” As much a study of light and time itself as of their putative subjects, these works richly reward however much time we, as viewers, are willing to give.