By Rachael Hanley (NMH Magazine, August 2010) One February evening, as the sun was sinking low on the horizon, Erika Blumenfeld ‘90 set out on her daily kilometer-long trek across the Antarctic ice. Ahead of her was the black geodesic dome where she worked and occasionally slept. Behind her was a research station, an oasis of warmth and light in the sea of white. But Blumenfeld, swaddled in 40 pounds of clothing, stopped and turned her face toward the horizon…read more »
By Arden Reed (CCA Catalogue, July 2005) The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. –William Carlos Williams Reduce. Reduce in order to get down to the essence, to the thing itself.1 Clear a space to record something elusive. But not something hidden, as you might suppose; reduce, rather, in order to document the everyday, the omnipresent, the “little bit too self-evident”—-namely light itself. “Light” was the infant Erika…read more »
By Kyle MacMillan (Denver Post, December 1, 2006) For centuries, painters have tried to capture the elusive effects of light in their canvases, and in recent decades artists such as Dan Flavin, James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson have made light the very essence of their work. Photography, of course, is unthinkable without light: The medium is by definition the creation of images through the imprinting of light either chemically or digitally. Erika Blumenfeld, an innovative, fast-rising Santa Fe artist, takes…read more »
By Sue Taylor (Art in America, October 2001) “Moments of Light” was the title of Erika Blumenfeld’s exhibition of minimalistic photographs with time as their underlying theme. Blumenfeld has invented a process for producing imageless pictures of passing events—-a tempest, sunset or solstice. Modifying a 19th-century view camera for use with Polaroid film, she found that light creeping into the imperfect device exposed the film without her manipulating the shutter. Her serial “Light Leaks” resulted from this serendipitous discovery, which…read more »
