Jane Evans and the Sierra Gorda Mountains
By Margaret Failoni, Oct 6, 2006

''Vastness'' by Jane Evans  Friday, October 20, 7pm, Museo de la Ciudad Guerrero 27 Nte, Centro Histórico, Santiago de Querétaro, Qro.

Photography came into being through an artistic urge. Louis Daguerre was an artist, a scene painter whose illusionist diorama was a landmark in Paris long before he announced, in 1839, his daguerreotype process, which used light-sensitive silver salts to record an optical image. This was discovered by no one man but was the outcome of the early observations of the actions of light by alchemists and chemists. Therefore, the use of photography did not occur until there was a demand for pictures following the rise of the bourgeoisie well after the French Revolution. 

The first criticism of photography was a comparison of the new medium with paintings and drawings, since no other standards of picture-making existed. Photography’s ability to record a seemingly inexhaustible amount of detail was marveled at again and again.

The technique of photography was immediately recognized as a shortcut to art. But formal art education had a definite purpose over and above the mastery of technique. The discipline taught art students to observe and gave them a feeling of the significant moments of time and an intuitive sense of composition.

In the hands of artists, photography quickly showed its artistic possibilities.

In England, a heyday of photography followed Scott Archer’s invention of the collodian process in 1851. This new technique rapidly displaced and made obsolete the daguerreotype. The new process, which was free from patent restrictions, attracted amateurs and artists alike.

The introduction of the dry plate in the 1880s attracted even more amateurs to photography. These same amateurs were responsible for many of the photographic innovations throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Photographers could buy ready-made plates and process them at their convenience. Since then, numerous advancements have been made in this extraordinary medium: better cameras, new developing techniques, new and better chemicals, modern, faster films, and so on. Perhaps the greatest breakthrough has been the digital camera for both still and motion photography and the use of computers for manipulating graphics.

But the artist’s control and use of different techniques is mitigated by two major factors: the nature of the recording process and the nature of the image the artist wants to record. Frequently, we mistakenly believe that the camera’s image reproduces nature as the human eye sees it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the camera’s ability to record things in a way the unaided human eye can never see them is one of the most important attributes of photography.

The human eye can focus on but one small area at a time; consequently, we observe an object or a scene only by allowing our eyes to rove over it in a series of short jumps. The assortment of images thus recorded is flashed to the brain, which sorts and edits them. The camera’s eye makes no such distinction; every detail within its field of vision can be recorded instantly. In its ability to register fine detail and its ability to render an unbroken sequence of infinitely subtle gradations, the photograph cannot be equaled by any work of the human hand. But human sensitivity and artistic shaping can determine whether a photograph is a work of art.

 

Photography has continued to evolve over the last century. With the use of a digital camera and a computer, the artist Jane Evans has been able to connect the Sierra Gorda peaks and valleys to bring us a panorama of this exceptional mountain range.

The camera recorded the details that the artist’s eye could not see, but it is the artist’s sensitivity, her innate taste in choosing light and angles, plus the awe she felt in visiting these mountains, that led her to try to achieve on printed paper the feeling of the mountains’ majesty. 

Originally a superb creator of aquatint etchings of semiabstract landscapes, Jane Evans has delved deeply into the photographic medium with equal intent and mastery. This series of the Sierra Gorda mountain range is visual poetry. So impressed is the Canadian artist with this part of the world, she has built a small paradise for herself in one of its valleys, which she calls home. So impressed are we with this series of photographs, we can only thank the artist for presenting them to us.

“Vastness,” Evans’s solo exhibit of the Sierra Gorda Mountain series, opens October 20 in Santiago de Querétaro. The show runs through December 3. Evans’s work is currently also on display at Generator Gallery in Fábrica La Aurora as part of the group exhibit of paper works. The exhibit ends November 1.



“Vastness”
By Jane Evans

Further still, the most remote of distances.

—Juan Rulfo

I have always been fascinated by my connection to the landscape. I was raised in the far north of Canada, where one’s relationship with the land is not romantic. One is constantly aware of one’s vulnerability, scale and context. One is always but a guest. I made work about awe and the sublime ... work that adored the land but was hostile to the traditional romance of Canadian landscape painting. In the 1980s I made monumental works on canvas and etchings that were psychological, related to claustrophobia and agoraphobia—15-meter-long etchings held back by careful matting and framing—keeping the encroaching land at bay, or perhaps keeping me from crossing over. I predictably progressed to multiple moving images on film and video, this time equating the land to female bodies beneath velvet blankets. Since coming to Mexico, in spite of its exquisite and varied beauty, I had not felt a powerful association with the land—until I came around a curve on the highway in the High Sierra of Querétaro. In a single moment 
the landscape ceased to be an intellectual or physical experience for me, but rather a profoundly spiritual one. I felt diminished, humbled. I was in the presence of God.