Garie Waltzer was born in New York City and received her BFA in painting and MFA in photography from State University of New York/ Buffalo. An early proponent of new technology in art, she helped create Cleveland’s Image Resource Center, a collaborative studio/lab in the1980’s. Her large color electrostatic collages have been included in many national exhibitions, in publications on the genre, and in corporate and museum collections. She is a recipient of artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council.  Waltzer chaired the photography department at Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College for many years. Having returned to her studio fulltime, she is producing new work on the cultural landscape. She recently completed a documentary project in Cleveland commissioned by the George Gund Foundation. Her work appears in Light Work’s Contact Sheet 2008 Annual, as well as being featured in Light Work’s Fine Print program.

Garie Waltzer’s carbon pigmented inkjet images explore the convergence of time, place and populace with views of civic spaces - parks, piazzas, pools, and busy streets - as visual witness to a collective narrative of our time. Work from this series was recently added to the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Robert B. Menschel Media Center, and Houston’s Museum of Fine Art.

For the past several years I have been photographing the civic landscape – plazas, pools, parks and busy streets - places made and inhabited over time. The images explore the cultural landscape as an organism with structure, flow, synchronicity, and collective narrative. I often use elevated vantage points and deep vistas, revealing relationships of space and time not observed at the pedestrian level. In this compressed landscape, past and present reside simultaneously. I am interested in leveling the hierarchy of information in a scene, encouraging the viewer to move around inside the image, and spend time engaging with its telling detail. The architectural elements provide an armature for the flow of mutable and transitory aspects of the scene, creating the formal structure of the image, while becoming the stage for the action. I print the images at both 22” and 30” square, using carbon pigmented (grayscale) inks. This scale enables a view of both the gestalt and the specificity of detail that is abundant, embedded and particular to the ways we inhabit a place.

wall space gallery | 116 East Yanonali St C-1 Santa Barbara, California 93101 | 805.637.3898 | gallery@wall-spacegallery.com

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