New City
September 6 - October 12, 2002
I Space

Claire Wolf Krantz
Java, In Time and  Memory
by Michael Weinstein

Infused with the insight that memory is the marriage of reality and imagination, Claire Wolf Krantz's photo-art commemorates her aesthetic, moral and emotional responses to the exotic lands that she visits around the world. Krantz begins with base photographic images of everyday life and ancient holy places, and then surrounds them with idyllic landscape paintings in luminous and intense, yet cool colors that tantalize us to wish that we could enter the enveloping world that she creates. Her mural-sized, five-panel work, "Java, in Time and Memory," takes us up swirling mountains dotted with scenes of human life. At the bottom of the first panel, we see a squalid marketplace; as we ascend, we encounter tourists; and near the top, we gaze upon ruins and statues of ancient gods with two men who have transcended the crowd.

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.