Erika Blumenfeld
Erika Blumenfeld is an American transdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose practice is driven by the wonder of natural phenomena, humanity's relationship with the natural world, and the intersections between art, science, nature, and culture. Blumenfeld's artistic inquiries trace and archive the evidence and stories of connection across the cosmos. Blumenfeld is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Smithsonian Fellow, a Creative Capital Awardee and has exhibited her work widely in museums and galleries nationally and internationally since 1994. Since the early 2000s, Blumenfeld has been an artist-in-residence at laboratories, observatories and in extreme environments, collaborating with scientists and research institutions, such as NASA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the South African National Antarctic Program and the McDonald Observatory. Blumenfeld's art practice is described as non-traditional and research-based, where the artist has explored many fields and disciplines, including astronomy, geology, planetary science, ecology, environmental conservation, and cultural heritage. Blumenfeld's research and inquiry have resulted in interdisciplinary artworks in multiple mediums, including interactive 3D computer graphics and 3D modeling, digital media, photography, video art, painting, drawing, sculpture, and writing, which the artist views as the artifacts of her artistic process.
Early life, education and early career
Blumenfeld was born in Newark, New Jersey. Although she moved frequently throughout her childhood, she was raised primarily in the Boston/Cambridge area. Blumenfeld's curiosity for both the arts and the sciences was encouraged with classes in dance, painting, and classical piano as well as her school's science, rocket, and computer clubs. A defining moment looking at another galaxy through a telescope when she was a child ignited her passion for the cosmos. Blumenfeld began focusing her artistic pursuits more seriously in 1988 while in high school at Northfield Mount Hermon School. At that time she was focused on the nature of light through the medium of photography, a subject she would return to throughout her interdisciplinary career. Discussing Blumenfeld's longtime obsession with light, scholar Arden Reed, wrote: "’Light’ was the infant Erika Blumenfeld's first word, as it was literally the last word of Wilhelm von Goethe, another investigator of that phenomenon." Blumenfeld's early black and white photographic abstractions of light and form were first published in the New England Journal of Medicine when she was 19 years old as part of their curated photographic supplementation sections. Early process experimentation led the artist to invent a unique photographic process in her early 20s, then a student of photography at Parsons School of Design, while working with large-format photographic plates and what she describes as "improvised" chemistry. Blumenfeld named her process "Lunatype" for its likeness to the daguerreotype and ambrotype processes of the late 1800s. Blumenfeld completed most of her college coursework between 1990 and 1993, including a year co-attending Parsons Paris and La Sorbonne’s Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Françaises de la Sorbonne in Paris, after which time she left her studies and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to begin her career as an artist. Blumenfeld's first solo exhibition in 1994, titled "Into the Looking Glass," premiered her first Lunatypes, a series of self-portraits exploring film noire and mythology. The first museum acquisition of her work, a Lunatype titled "Shattered Illusions," was procured by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 1998 under the auspices of then curator Anne Wilkes Tucker. Blumenfeld later completed her coursework and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2006. She went on to earn a Master of Science in Conservation Studies from University College London in 2014 with a thesis on preserving the natural, cultural, tangible, and intangible significance of the dark night sky and our view of the cosmos.Work
Light Recordings (1998–2015)
Blumenfeld's series Light Recordings are a series of photo-based and video-based works that are recordings of natural light onto photographic film and digital sensors without the use of a traditional camera or lens. The work documents the pure phenomena of light itself across various atmospheric conditions and astronomical cycles, such as solstices, eclipses, lunar cycles, and the Sun's daily shifting light through the seasons. The exposures are often installed together in series or a grid format to visually chronicle the recorded light phenomena over time.Blumenfeld developed the Light Recordings process in the winter of 1998, while testing a custom Polaroid film adapter she had built for her 1888 large-format Antony Climax Portrait Camera; the artist kept the lens closed and took an exposure onto a piece of Polaroid film to see if she had any light leaking through her new adapter. The test revealed that she had a light leak, which exposed the film in an arced gradation, a process that Blumenfeld realized distilled photography down to its essential elements: light and light sensitive material, where light was both medium and subject. Blumenfeld describes this as a critical moment in her artistic process, where in the months prior to her discovery she was beginning to feel discontented with the photographic medium, realizing that the "photograph of a thing is not the thing itself". Her discovery of the Light Recordings process altered the direction of her work, coalescing formal, technical and philosophical progressions in her methodologies, and bringing forth both a conceptual and scientific focus that has been prevalent in her work since. The artist continued to build her own recording devices, which she describes as like a camera obscura, but one which disregards optical mathematics used to achieve proper focal length. The Light Recordings work spans the first twenty years of Blumenfeld's career and has been exhibited in museums in the U.S. and abroad, including the Tate Modern, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Nevada Museum of Art, Kunstnernes Hus, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
In 2001, art historian and critic Sue Taylor wrote in Art in America that Blumenfeld's Light Recordings were "a serendipitous discovery" that could be likened to other lensless photographic processes such as the photogram or cliché-verre. Describing the artist's first major museum exhibition, Taylor wrote, "For all its sheer facticity and its reduction of photography to litmus paper, this work can nevertheless inflict that pang Roland Barthes associated with the punctum. The real punctum of a photograph, Barthes knew, is time—corrosive and mortal—and Blumenfeld’s fleeting moments of light show us this stark truth anew".
In 2004, Blumenfeld was offered an artist-in-residence at the McDonald Observatory to image a full lunar cycle from new moon to new moon through an altered telescope, producing her first video installation, Moving Light: Lunation 1011, which has been exhibited widely including Tate Modern. Scholar and author Arden Reed wrote that in her Light Recordings work " Blumenfeld has photographed nothing but natural phenomena... her project renounces the manipulation of the artist and the mediation of a lens—two things that have been central to photography from its inception. By banishing style or "self-expression" and by suspending the editing work of the lens Blumenfeld exposes light directly to the recording surface, the tabula rasa. This is radical empiricism."
Blumenfeld's Light Recordings are described as being reminiscent of Minimalism, Op art and the Light and Space movement, although art critic John Zotos says: "this work operates in the area that sits between the artist and object at a kind of remove as no visible trace of the artist's identity seems to come through. This is exactly where the work departs from minimalist dogma and the distillation of content into form; Blumenfeld's images are essentially of nature, in a specific place, time and duration; therefore, they are filled with commentary about ecological and environmental issues transformed into a minimalist vocabulary". Art critic Franklin Sirmans states: "While Blumenfeld’s highly inventive strategies for making photographs are thoroughly of this moment, the physical structure of her finished pieces suggests an affinity with the early Minimalists. In particular, her display of grids and serial images bears resemblance to the work of such ‘60s painters and sculptors as Robert Ryman and Donald Judd. Yet Blumenfeld's interest in the grid goes beyond its use as a formal device, entering a realm of latent meaning that Judd and company would never have considered as part of their work". Blumenfeld's Light Recordings have been likened to Mark Rothko’s paintings, Robert Irwin’s early disks, Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light sculptures, and James Turrell’s light works, they have been discussed alongside the work of Olafur Eliasson and Carsten Holler and have been exhibited in the company of Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Josef Albers, and Marcia Hafif. Curator, writer, and critic, Lilly Wei writes that Blumenfeld's work is more "informed by pluralism, hybridization and more syncretic orientations" than the artists the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Bioluminescence series (2001/2011)
In 2000, Blumenfeld became interested in working with the phenomena of light in other forms and was particularly inspired by light involved in biological processes. She became curious about working with bioluminescence as a medium and creating a large-scale living installation of bioluminescent marine dinoflagellates. Initial research led her to Marine Biologist Dr. Michael Latz at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he runs a research laboratory and studies bioluminescent organisms in ocean environments. Blumenfeld initiated a dialogue with Latz which culminated in an artist-in-residence at Latz Laboratory in 2001 to learn how to care for the phytoplankton and spend time observing their luminescence. Blumenfeld's artworks in this series explore the bioluminescent dinoflagellate known as Pyrocystis fusiformis which are a bright and larger species of phytoplankton.Blumenfeld's collaboration with Latz marked her first collaboration with a scientist, her first artist-in-residence at a science institution, and her first deliberate effort to bridge the fields of art and science in her work. Her first works in this series explored working with an aeration system that stimulated the glow of the phytoplankton by bubbles. In her lab testing, she found that when the aeration system was nearly off, producing only one bubble at a time, she could achieve an equilibrium with the organisms, and they would produce a steady glow for a period of time. Her studies produced visualizations of her proposed installation and the first photo-based artworks in this series. Her work also prompted Latz and his research colleagues to further study her single-bubble experiments, which Latz says led to their "quantifying the light production by single bubbles and bubble clouds".
Discussing the wonder of these bioluminescent organisms, Blumenfeld says of her efforts to work across the fields of art and science: "Awe is not academic, but rather, visceral. I believe that awe is the point where art and science meet. Understanding the science brings richness to the experience of the artwork, and also to the experience of our world, but I’m interested in the poetry within the science." Blumenfeld's conceptual interest centered around these organisms’ contribution to planetary health, specifically their being a crucial part of ocean and atmospheric health. Blumenfeld has described her concern for the impact of anthropogenic climate change, industrial toxic waste, and ocean acidification on global phytoplankton populations, with scientific reports then estimating 40% reduction. Her intent is to initiate a public discussion through her work, showing that phytoplankton produce more than 50% of Earth's oxygen and are the base of Earth's food chain. She believes that phytoplankton are essential to the planet's health despite their seeming disconnection to daily human life.
Blumenfeld was awarded a second artist-in-residence with Latz in 2011 and worked with a flow agitation chamber, which simulates ocean dynamics, to investigate a large population of Pyrocystis fusiformis consisting of one million organisms, and a small population to attempt to also capture individual cells. This second collaboration resulted in an exhibition in Paris in 2012 called Carbon 12. She spoke on a panel discussion at UNESCO Headquarters that addressed the cultural and scientific contributions that art can have in addressing issues of climate change and environmental issues. Of her work, Blumenfeld states, "While not all phytoplankton are bioluminescent, the ones that are provide a beautiful way to talk about our natural environment and our relationship to it. The beauty of light captures our imagination, our sense of deep awe. That these organisms give light as part of their natural cycle is wondrous and inspiring. That these organisms are also crucial to each breath we take is quite poignant."