Critical Review by Kristen T. Woodward for Aedra Fine Arts 

A conceptual photographer and video installation artist, Cheryl Maeder has exhibited her environmentally focused work extensively in the United States and Europe for over two decades. Her projects of international scope include a traveling group exhibition curated by Arts Connection Foundation, sharing her work with audiences in Bogota, Caracas, Valencia, Miami, Santo Domingo, San Nicolas and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. The Portal, a collection of Cheryl’s video installations, was successfully installed at John F. Kennedy New York, Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale International Airports. Recently, her work was notably featured in the Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary Art Fair, the Miami New Media Festival, and at Cornell Art Museum. She was also recently shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Award’s Alpha Female Award.

The large format photographic landscapes often feature intrusions of intense fuchsia, red and yellow clouds on open seas, suggesting an amorphous but interloping human presence in otherwise pristine waters. The origins and substance of the colored fogs are unknown, but invite scrutiny into otherwise idyllic spaces. When human figures are included in her photographic series such as La Mer, Cloud Nine, Far and Away, and others, color relationships similarly vacillate in stark contrast between the natural and artificial. In some cases, artifice serves as a vehicle for the supernatural, or the profoundly sublime.

Voyage triptych paradoxically dots dozens of small figures with brightly colored innertubes against verdantly green swimming holes. Crisply focused edges tilt the piece towards surrealism, as bathers’ saturated swimsuits stand apart from overgrown algae and lush grass. While there’s a sense of crowded intrusion in several of these scenes, there’s also a pleasurable mix of texture and lurid color. Another series of photographs entitled Submerge continues the artist’s progression from the macrocosmic to microcosmic, with close up views of individual swimmers. These closer views, however, don’t afford us with more information as her swimmers are abstracted by their submersion- forming brief flashes of vibrant color and flesh against surfaces disturbed by choppy waves. Easy to see the linkage between these still photographs and Cheryl’s videos, which animate whirling movements and vocalizations against natural sounds of rushing and bubbling waters. 

Submerge, a short two-minute film of a lone swimmer, explores basic and primal relationships between human beings and water. A female subject in a blue floral suit repeatedly curls into a fetal position from a supine float, creating associations with embryonic fluid and dreams. Transitions between poses include brief fades, and at times the figure appears to dissolve completely against a slightly pixelated color field. Several pieces within the series possess a high degree of abstraction. Submerge I, a large digital photograph on paper appears to be a still image 01:41 minutes into the film. Compositionally, the piece forgoes the intense color palette of other frames containing the swimmer as her bathing suit melts into refracted water droplets. A shape of dark hair just below the surface remains her only distinguishing feature. The effect reveals a nude body almost completely obscured by ripples in shallow water. The brash blue suggests a pool rather than a natural body, and so the human form unexpectedly flips to play the role of the natural against the artificial in the piece.

Cheryl Maeder’s enduring formal and conceptual concerns with ecology and landscape evoke essential biological connections and weave together the profane with the unexpected. She frames humanity’s break from nature through a language and lens of diverging color, and as such, unassuming beach scenes speak to deeper fissures. She asks us to contemplate our elemental link to living waters, and how we now shape our ties to the earth. Taken together, her video installations and still photographs build a philosophical purpose as well as transcend the individual experience to arrive at collective, universal beauty.

Written by Kristen T. Woodward, Curator, MFA, Professor of Art, Albright College

A Super Natural Experience: The Art of Cheryl Maeder

Cheryl Maeder has stated that her art, at its core is about connection; to the environment, to the self, to each other, and with all life forms. The artist indeed manifests a tangible connectiveness between nature, the optical realm of an artwork and in turn the viewer of the work. She does this through a methodology of performing ephemeral yet powerful interventions in a landscape. It is a time-consuming process that involves location scouting, multiple levels of planning, on-site trials and errors with her eco-friendly materials, and lots of shooting, whilst hoping for the weather to cooperate and enhance her activities. All of this so she can capture a split second of time where all the elements come together in an aesthetically gorgeous photograph or short film.

To create works for her Super Natural series, Maeder chooses a specific environmental scene and taps into the frequencies of weather by releasing a burst of bright primary color (she keeps the material a mystery) that rides the air, creating effects that exist in real time for only a few moments as wind and gravity quickly moves, blows and then dissipates the color. During the brevity of their flight, these clouds of color coalesce, with changing density and opaqueness morph into flowing shapes. The effect introduces artistically formal elements into the compositions, resulting in a connective collaboration with nature.

These aesthetic additions to a landscape echo and then heighten similar qualities of artful elements and principles that nature creates on its own, but most often we take for granted as we live our daily lives. In real life, it takes purposeful looking to get to the place of seeing, and feeling, a deeper appreciation of what nature provides us.  Through her art, Maeder makes visible the powerful energies at play on our planet, unseen by the naked eye, yet internally sensed when we are in a deeply felt state of the wonder of nature. 

The artist’s photographs, short films and installations present the observer with a feeling that they are witnessing something profound, perhaps even from the beyond. And the stunning natural landscape we are beholding somehow feels even more phenomenal, as if a supernatural experience attuned us to what we already know deep inside, if only we would let the connectiveness of the universe be more present in our lives.

By Kara Walker Tomé, Independent Arts Consultant, Curator and Writer, Instagram @karacuratortome

ART REVIEW

“ Cheryl Maeder utilizes her camera’s technology as a precision instrument to replace the traditional tools of an artist’s studio, such as brushes and paint. She takes her inspiration from the great color field painters Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, as well as others who pioneered abstraction saturated with color. Ms. Maeder travels a different road, cleverly and diligently mapping out her own highly idiosyncratic, dreamy and purposely out-of-focus subjects that are often found on the beach.  Her attraction to the edge of the ocean allows her the perfect stage set, which often is equally divided between the sand, the water and the sky. Once she has surveyed her surroundings for bits and pieces of color, often borrowed from a beach umbrella, a handsome sunset or an unrecognizable group of swimmers frolicking in the surf, Maeder waits patiently for just the perfect moment before initiating a split second snap of her lens. What makes this artist’s works so compelling is that her compositions are unique, complex, and have very little in common with others who are exploring the delicate balance between realism and washed out abstraction. The recognition that Maeder’s work is currently enjoying literally around the globe is well-earned, and she seems to be just at the mid-point of a promising, brilliant career.”  

-Bruce Helander, Artist/Curator & Writer for Huffington Post and Art News Magazines.