Accomodating Vision: Travels with Joan Schreder

Joan Schreder's photographs, watercolors and paintings of her world
travels are concerned primarily with the pursuit in recording beauty, be
it natural or cultural, in a beautiful way. At first glance her artworks
are genre scenes that offer a documentory approach to the apprehension
of locales and their geographic specificities. However, a deeper
analysis of structure and style of artist's work offers a more
tantalizing, and more correct appreciation of the complexity of these
subdued, yet lyrically understated images. While they do contain visual
codes referring to travel, especially when seen as a group, there is
much more here than what meets the eye at first.

Joan Schreder's images are persuasive and authentic because they are
complex and rich --- offering us multi-layered visual experiences, which
reveal themselves slowly over time. It is for this reason that I propose
that if we were to look at the deep structure of her work we will
realize her images contain a purposeful sense of narration. They
consist of three distinct layers.

The first, we might say, is the story line in the artist's works. The
story which is being recounted is the actual event which we are
witnessing in looking at each scene. This event has nothing to do with
plot or characters or their actions in the traditional sense. Rather,
the event is the being-ness, the presence itself of the movement through
space and time and local history. They are clearly derived from eye
witnessing of the space and energy of each location. The "narrative" in
each work might be considered in light of how change (as event) is
depicted. In other words, in what manner are we to sense the stopped
gaze of the artist as she transcribes her on-the-spot-experience of
taking-in the landscape of urbanscape that dwells before her.

Artist's pictorial unity which envelops the fragmented nature of
apprehending her multi-vistas narrates a sense of urgency as well as a
relaxed compositional breadth and spontaneous freedom which expresses an
inner vitality. The artist's image-making has a force that stirs us
precisely because they appear on the one hand so tangibly, palpably
accessible. The simplicity, the radical intensity and focus of artist's
works includes a satisfying use of the devices of radical cropping an
almost cinematic sense of the close-up. The inherent drama of the work
sets up the allegorical conceit of the artist not only replicating the
world, Pygmalion-like, but re-creating it, perpetually. Thus the
signification of the paper or board surface becomes of paramount
importance. The pools of liquid color coalescing on the surface
resonates with the deep allegory of inscribing the world-surface with
energies, that is, they embody the fructification of the artist's
creative powers mimetically, illusionistically, and metaphorically.

The third level is the process of narrating that the artist engages in,
that is the relations between the artist's voice (her vision) and the
viewer she is speaking to. There is a documentary truthfulness to these
works as the artist attempts not only to inform but also to persuade her
viewer of the impact of each place.

Joan Screder's multilayered images are deceptively low-keyed and
diffident, yet hardly neutral. This non-neutrality allows entry into the
mind of the artist and the soul of each place. They ask the viewer to
become grounded within the experience of being embedded in the factness
of the landscape, of its tenacity, of its aloofness and majesty. On
another level Schreder's works have a near epic sweep and they are
anything but about materiality. The contemplation of grandeur is in no
small part a measure of our capacity to imagine an entire cosmos
speaking softly to us. In Schreder's world we sense ourselves in the
presence of images mirroring a perfectly familiar and unknown objects.
Through it we experience an extension of our intimate space by the
incursion of detailed visual reportage on everyday scenes and on those
of the natural world.

D.F. Colman