Art Papers
Jan/Feb 2003
I Space

Claire Wolf Krantz
Java, In Time and Memory
By Susan Senseman

A large scale, five panel mixed media painting, Java, In Time and Memory functions as a dynamic wall installation in which CLAIRE WOLF KRANTZ juxtaposes photographic components of places she visits with large painterly fields of color. Her technical proficiency in both digitally manipulated photography and painting allows her to investigate broader issues such as the perception of space, the analysis of material culture and the idea that memory is an individual construct processed through the use of text and visual languages.

 I have been struck by how Krantz has brought her intellectual capabilities to her paintings. Although her digital imagery certainly is successful, Krantz has set out an unusual and difficult objective for her work, conflating gestural abstraction with the more analytical qualities of photographic and digital imaging. Each element functions as a code of meaning; the paint signifies the "drift" through immense space as one moves toward focus on and recognition of a specific place and time while the computer-generated images locate the viewer in that moment.

Krantz's previous investigation of architectural structures in relationship to organized religion was pivotal in her development of work that challenges the viewer's perception of recognizable imagery.

She has written of her interest in "alternative ways of seeing" and in the critical and visual dimension of non-linear thinking, and described a configuration of perception that defies singularity as "rhizomic thinking." Although she does not claim to construct multiple views as a strategy of feminist thinking, I find her work compelling on that level. Multiple points of view, the organization of fragments within a space, and a recognition of an individual's ability to construct her/his own narrative structure make a cogent proposal for non-hierarchical certainty of her analysis of place.

 Place is experienced in Krantz's work from a distance as well as at close range because of the specificity of the photographic images collaged onto the painted canvas. The recent 23-foot long work is particularly successful because the spectator must walk the length of the piece to experience it horizontally and then view each panel vertically as one would visually travel within a Chinese scroll landscape. Krantz wants the viewer to move using this strategy to reference the nomadic drift that has led to her analysis of historic and contemporary structures that influence and help to construct meaning within a particular culture. Guy Dubord's description of the psychological pull to a particular location along the unspecified path of a walk through a city is not unlike Krantz's exploration of the dynamism of memories within a mind's accumulation of information and images. In On Longing, Susan Stewart writes about the purposes and effects of gigantism and miniaturization. Similarly, Krantz depicts the large sweep of a romanticized and emotive landscape through her act of painting material culture. She questions how she and her viewers process information as a spectator. Her use of figures within the work—tourists, inhabitants of a site, and stand-ins for those characters—is provocative, because the viewer of her work looks at other viewers within the space depicted.

In this era of global information systems, Krantz explores the differences between those who live in a place and those who view it as tourists. In this visually rich and conceptually complex work, Krantz is unusual and timely as she describes culture in today's moments of change.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.