Featured Artist Pamela Viola

Featured Artist Pamela Viola expresses herself and her observations in a stunning photography portfolio. For more information and images, visit her website.

 

 

For me, it’s all about seeing, exercising my awareness and seeking the unseen. I work primarily with the natural landscape, but I consider my work interpretive photography; meaning I develop the image beyond the straight photographic capture – sometimes layering multiple images and textures together to create an embellished landscape. My interest lies in manipulating the mood of the scene beyond the limits of the literal photograph.

 

 

My current photographic technique has evolved from my work with Polaroid and other types of transfer printing. Depending on the emotion I want to create, I make color, saturation, focus and textural choices, sometimes adding additional story elements in order to create a heightened sense of drama or a dreamlike quality. At times I will paint a specific texture, scan, and then layer the digital version on an image. I often use luminous light from a mysterious source to direct focus; but most of all, I experiment with various scenarios of color and focal point as I develop the work.

 

 

The embellished landscape is an ongoing theme in my body of work. While sometimes dark and haunting in tonality, the overarching simplicity of my compositions evokes a sense of peace and tranquility in the countryside. I feel my most successful pieces are those that invoke a powerful silence and mysterious quality that rouses a viewer to imagine themselves in the scene creating their own narrative and wanderings.

 

 

 

BIO: Pamela (Hochschartner) Viola began making photography-based images in a high school art class at the age of fourteen with a plastic Diana camera. A few years later she was exhibiting traditional black and white silver gelatin prints of American Southwest architectural subjects in galleries throughout New York, New England and Colorado, winning multiple show awards and artist grants.

 

 

During a 1979 Bennington College internship at the renowned Light Gallery in New York City, Pamela was exposed to the work of photography masters Strand, Adams, Cunningham, Steichen, Winogrand and witnessed the challenges modern photography faced from traditional curators and art historians. At that time, some traditionalists considered photography less than a fine art because of its reliance on a “recording device” and the possibility of unlimited editions. In many ways similar discussions have been revived with the advent of the digital age.

 

 

In 1988 she turned her attention from still photography to motion pictures, and spent 15 years working as a freelance Production Coordinator and Production Manager on feature films such as Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Natural Born Killers, Nell and Six Degrees of Separation.

 

 

Currently her photography and mixed media artwork is an interpretive layering of photographic images and textures that has developed as a result of her experimentation with various transfer printing techniques. Her moody and haunting compositions provoke the viewer to create their accompanying narratives.