SOUTH NEWFANE — Fine art photographer Christine Triebert of South Newfane has recently been awarded a Vermont Arts Endowment Fund grant from the Vermont Community Foundation.
The grant is provided in support of her “Geomorph – After the Flood” project, a large-scale installation of photographic images inspired by the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene on her property along the Rock River.
Close-up photographs of rock surfaces, patterns in sand, rushing water, and organic and man-made debris are the subject matter in this series.
“Witnessing the complete rearrangement of the local landscape from Irene's flooding led me to this project. It's served as a way of making visual order out of the chaos of that experience, and of finding beauty within destruction,” said Triebert.
The grant will help bring this work to public venues around the state, both as a large-scale installation where possible, and in a smaller, interactive version, she explained.
In the smaller version, the photographs are designed as magnetized, moveable pieces on a metal board, so that the individual images can be easily reassembled into a variety of new groupings.
According to Triebert, this is an important aspect of the project: “to give viewers the opportunity to move the pieces around themselves, create their own unique patterns, and interact with the art as a metaphor for the nature of change.”
The first exhibit of “Geomorph – After the Flood” is opening at the Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown, Mass., on Friday, Aug. 29.
It will next be shown in part at the Vermont Center for Photography on Flat Street, opening on Nov. 7 in a group show with four other local photographers: Suzanne Flynt, Evie Lovett, Joan O'Beirne, and Lynne Weinstein.
Triebert's work of unique, cameraless imagery will be featured at Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts, Brattleboro's newest contemporary art gallery, at 183 Main St., opening Sept. 18.