Artist Feature Catalogue – Critical Review written by Michael Hanna, Editor & Curator – Titan Contemporary Publishing

Cheryl Maeder is a conceptual landscape photographer and video artist who has exhibited across the United States, especially in Florida, Europe, and the Middle East. Recent exhibitions and film festivals include Millennium Film Workshop in New York, Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach, Florida, Art and Culture Center in Hollywood, Florida, Mark Hachem Gallery in both Paris & Palm Beach, Paris Women CineFest, Somerset House in London, Arts Connection Foundation in Miami, and Palazzo Bembo for the Venice Biennale. Cheryl's works remain in notable permanent collections including The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, Coral Springs Museum of Art, Delta Air Lines, Montefiore Medical Center, New Rochelle Emergency Department & Radiology Center, Good Samaritan Medical Center, Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute, and the Elliott Museum in Stuart, Florida.

Ethereal and apparitional, Cheryl Maeder uses strategic props such as colored smoke, balloons, and bubbles to interact with recreational natural environments such as beaches and parks. She captures the fusion between playful color and nature to express a notion as if enchanting spaces to the very whims of her imagination. By infusing magical elements into nature, Cheryl wishes to communicate oneness between humanity and the natural world, all while making a statement about the relevance of ecology for sustainment among future generations of creatures and humans. The photography and short films express pleasurable moments of joyous, flamboyant colors floating amongst the mist of a forest or the dew of the morning shoreline.

The signature sets of works and series in Cheryl Maeder's portfolio consist of the Super Natural photographs and Super Natural Orbs film. In the Super Natural photography, the viewer embarks on closed compositions of beaches and forests engulfed in colorful sfumato. As if a burst of magic were thrust into the air or Cheryl behaved like a wizard and enchanted the environment with sacred magic and runes to call upon spirits of another realm or ancient times. These imaginative photographs express a rumination of child-like wonder and appreciation for nature beyond literal and documentary depictions. In essence, Cheryl Maeder reinterprets natural environments as vehicles of not only amazement and wonderment, but also as conduits of expression and poetic philosophy.

Super Natural Orbs is one of Cheryl's finest films containing a balloon floating amidst landscapes of forest and beaches. Ranging from pink, lime green, and crimson balloons, the subjects appear more like fantastical orbs monitoring the environment. As these free-flowing objects float amidst the air, Cheryl carefully captures the sustainment of the interaction between human-construct and naturality in perfect harmony with one another.

Cheryl Maeder is a dynamic photographer who very much enhances contemporary art through integrative methods of combining clever props with photography and film. She advances documentative approaches to have purpose beyond straightforward capturing and into realms of enchantment, apparitional qualities, and ethereal connotations through the use of props such as colored smoke and balloons. These fantastical landscapes exude a fantastical wonder and the power of illusion beyond mere recognizable and familiar means of expression such as painting or digital effects. What Cheryl Maedar achieves with props, photography, film, and nature infuses a synthesis of how visual art can use combinative conceptual techniques to express complex relationships, such as the bonding between humans and the natural world.

Written by Michael Hanna, Editor & Curator, Titan Contemporary Publishing

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.