Her images of the desert, great plains, city, sea and the open road all convey the obvious sense of motion creating much less of a descriptive landscape or cityscape by literally blurring the horizon line and creating a painterly effect. They are not representational, but much more emotional. In many cases with her images the brain is able to recognize what it is seeing, but the feeling one experiences is a little disconcerting. All within the frame, she is able to test the boundaries, particularly, between photography and drawing and abstract and representational.
Melanie McWhorter - photo - eye Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico 2010
An underlyiing construct that forms in the linchpin of postmodernism is the theory of deconstruction. Derrida saw behind a world of things and ideas all these hidden ammuptions, veiled meanings, and semiotic manipulations that undermine what individuals perceive. Life - and by extension art - is a shell game.
If the message is that meaning presents a shifiting ground then photography would seem the perfect messenger.
As a featured artist in the show, Falliers's work is always a pleasure to look at. Her images bespeak the minimalist language of space, light, and slective isolation as she captures the ong horizon lines - with their subtle green and brown expanses of prairie.
Falliers's work is actually very painterly and is a good fit with the traditions of landscape painting. This is particularly the case with the late night and early morning photographs of Los Angeles. Ladawn3 shoulders the ghost of Turner with his gauzy refracted atmospheres and his appirational colors that weave in and out of the haze.
Diane Armitage - THE Magazine, June 2009
Danae Falliers’s archival pigment prints, part of the artist’s Great Plains series, debut at a show called Vivid in Santa Fe, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. on April 24th. Vivid, curated by Cyndi Conn , hangs at Webster Collection at 54 1/2 Lincoln Avenue. It also includes photography by Robert Stivers, Michael Eastman, David Levinthal and Chuck Ramirez. Blur clearly (bad pun) remains a fixture of compelling minimalist photography like Falliers’s. The metaphor for fast-seeing, fast-driving, fast-living, appears particularly apt for this fast-approaching late-night fast art writing. Electrons meet, converge, bend at warp speed. Say it: street, field, horizon. Prove it. You can’t. Sometimes art captures just right the phenomenon (impossible) of wanting to match I see to I know. Over the edge of some long-gone rainbow a tornado or a dust storm might be only friction or tumult. Not long ago a woman I know offered that new fields (generic) offer seething potential but one must enter them “clean.” Clean was her word. Good word. Here’s to the clean line where blurred vision meets the field seething with proximity to some next contrast. How’s that for late night? Okay, not that late, but dark, okay? adobeairstreamhardhat.com 2009
nothing is something
By Kim Russo
Friday, April 24, 2009
Of the Journal
Cyndi Conn, the once artistic director at the Center for Contemporary Arts, is now working with partner Ben Lincoln on an innovative consulting and curatorial project called LAUNCHPROJECTS. Conn and Lincoln are rethinking and reinventing how art is seen, sold, and collected — locally and nationally. Anytime smart people think outside the box, unexpected and welcome surprises result.
One of those surprises is Conn's most recent curatorial project, an exhibition of contemporary photographs in the unconventional, brightly painted rooms of Webster Enterprises, housed above The Plaza restaurant. According to its Web site, Webster Enterprises was “[established] in 1972 [and] … continues to be the umbrella organization of personal and professional activities, investments, and philanthropy of Chris and Patti Webster. Originally focused on art brokerage and procurement services for collectors and museums, Christopher Webster Art Investments initially specialized in indigenous art of the Americas, vintage Western paintings and photography, and other related collectibles.”
Walking around the catacomb of offices at Webster, one encounters pre-Columbian and indigenous Native American objects and textiles, office furniture, a hammock, and for the next two months (thanks to the curatorial efforts of Conn) contemporary photographs by five emerging, mid-career and established artists. Webster Enterprises and LAUNCHPROJECTS are thinking outside of the box together, and it's a completely refreshing result.
The standard white-cube gallery space is one particular “box” that Conn and Lincoln have been questioning of late, and that is one reason Conn welcomed the challenge of hanging art on yellow, orange, green and blue walls next to dark bookcases thick with books and sideboards littered with pre-Columbian figures. Most curators would avoid this kind of environment, but Conn embraced it. She was wise enough to choose work that could hold up in a visual cacophony. The result is completely enjoyable and — lucky for all of us who are a little bored with the status quo — refreshing.
All of the work Conn chose for this exhibition has one quality in common: flamboyant color. Most of the work has a hidden narrative — a subtext underneath the pictured subject. For example, David Levinthal's photograph of a baseball player is iconic and monumental, which is ironic once the viewer realizes that the figure in the photograph is actually a toy only a couple of inches tall.
In Danae Falliers' work, the camera is not as important as the artist — Falliers is making all the moves here. Soft-focus blurs of color zip at high speed, horizontally, across the lower half of the frame; the upper portion remains resolutely slow, in blues and grays. This is the landscape of the American plains, the way we might remember seeing it from our cars. These landscapes are fast, blended smears, stripped of all details and laid flat, like a computer screen. In fact, to make these images, Falliers manipulates her own still landscape photographs in Photoshop. On a wall, inside a building, these images make us think about the landscape differently — as stilled movement instead of flaccid backdrop. They are illuminatingly beautiful reminders that nothing is fixed, nothing is solid, nothing is separate.
Falliers, like Ramirez, is also a graphic designer, as well as a consummate furniture designer, and her love of clean, careful craft shows up in her work. Her entire working philosophy is about riding the lines between sensibilities and disciplines — between design and art, photography and drawing, popular culture and high culture.
Stivers' technique suggests early 20th-century Pictorialism, a soft-focus, painterly style of photography that was replaced by the crisper modernism of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston and Paul Strand — photographers devoted to creating an identity for photography that was separate from, but equal to, painting.
But photography doesn't have to prove itself anymore, and because it doesn't, it is free to be anything, or nothing, at all. And clearly, LAUNCHPROJECTS will be showing us that there is much to be gained, and enjoyed, by eliminating some borders and rules.
3:00 pm –Marfa. TX. After a quick bite from the Food Shark truck, we moseyed around the galleries in town, which were rather disappointing on the whole. The sole exception to this is inde/jacobs, who is the local gallery for Judd and Chamberlain, among other established artists. The best exhibit I saw all weekend (excluding Chianti-run spaces) was in inde/jacobs’s photography and print annex. Featuring embossed prints of bodies of water by Ted Ollier, Polaroid pulls by Ellen Carey, and experimental photography by Danae Falliers, the show was eclectic but the individual parts were excellent.
- Percolator Magazine 2008
VIVA LA VIDA
Svelte and gorgeous furniture from the mind of excellent contemporary photographer Danae Falliers. Overtly modern furniture, with lines classic enough to suit any room, and all of it produced from woods carefully chosen for sustainability as well as beauty and crafted to specifications only by New Mexican artisans. There is quite a lot to be appreciative of about VIDA Design.
- Zane Fischer - The Santa Fe Reporter 2006
Depth of Field
Falliers often anchors her wide angle shots of the Texas plains to a specific cultural signifier - a passing freight train, a semi truck, or water towers. Falliers pictures bear resemblance to pastel drawings, or to stain paintings by Morris Louis. Photographs like texasredearch, texastrain and greenrain have titles with their words deliberately run together as a way to mirro the images' blurry birth. The work storm, with its blast of apocalyptic orange light and streaky grays bracketed by black clous, captures the ominous onset of severe weather in the calm before all hell breaks loose.
- Diane Armitage - THE Magazine 2005
Danae Falliers loves not only the speed of the open road; she revels in the dizzying 21st century information overload and in our ability to adapt to its frantic pace. At first glance, her landscapes appear to have been taken from a moving car or train, but it becomes apparent upon closer inspection that steady forward motion could not cause the blurring we see in her horizontal landscapes.
Here, speed is filtered through the artists' poetic vision. Her technique is so fluid that the photographs take on the characteristics of pastel drawings. Falliers' palette and the play of hard and soft edges are similar to that used by 19th - century landscape painters. At times it's easy to forget that her tools are a computer keyboard and screen and not chalk and fingers.
- Elizabeth Cook-Romero - The New Mexican / Pasatiempo 2005