Jenee Mateer
professor, photo imaging, Towson University

Bouquet, 2022
composite photograph
21” x 31.5”

Renascence, 2022
composite photograph
94” x 36.5”

Red Fruit, 2022
composite photograph
21” x 31.5”

Artist’s website
Instagram: @jeneemateer

“Catch it if you can.  The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and fleeing, and gone.”  –Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Photography is about time and time is a visible presence in my garden.  I am reminded that things of this world are an eternal dance of waves and particles, emanations of light, re-combinations, and re-incarnations of energy.  These images are at once a metaphor for our layered consciousness as well as, to borrow a phrase from Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a search for, “divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time.” These are images inspired by Renaissance still life paintings, representations of ‘nature mort’ or dead nature, but in essence, they are not just about death but rather a reminder of eternal cycles of composition/decomposition/re-composition and our connection to, and impact on, the world around us.