Film Lingual II
July 17 - August 16, 2008
The primary focus of my work is the narrative portrait of lost innocence. I am inspired by personal experiences and "found stories" from the outside. Children are icons of innocence but their purity is fragile and fleeting. My work is driven by a desire to explore these emotions from joy to angst and hope to pain. Another recurring theme is my passion for nature, a stimulus since childhood. Plants and animals re-appear throughout, while visual symbols and colors are used carefully to relay the context of a piece. My hope is to lure viewers into a narrative world full of allusions, leaving the mind room to explore its own meanings. I consider a piece successful if it meets my vision for a topic and simultaneously celebrates its intrinsic beauty. My goal is to achieve a balance of personal expression while conveying a universal message to the viewer. My process begins with an idea or an object of inspiration. Because my formal training is in photography, I rely on chance to capture imagery, whether a found object, a subject or a landscape. If the quest of a particular item eludes me, I enter my studio and create the object before using the camera. After I collect photo images, I painstakingly arrange and re-arrange the pieces into a composition on the computer. After printing multiple tiles, I glue them onto wood before using acrylic paints for the final piece, keeping the same attentiveness to detail used on the computer. I want the viewer to be drawn in by the content, but to feel pleasantly surprised by the raw texture of the surface. This careful combination of techniques creates a unique final image with the toggle between control and chance and nature and machine.
There are many rewards throughout these steps, but none greater than the ability to push past my own expectations into a subconscious creativity.
Carolina Cleere, a native Floridian, first picked up a camera at 25 while studying Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota. Since then, her life has been devoted to exploring narrative expression through photography and art.
Her professional career has taken her to newspapers and wire services in Seattle, New York and Tampa where she became an editorial illustrator, a journey that led her to a full-time pursuit in fine arts.
She has been recognized nationally for her photojournalism including five awards for Pictures of the Year from the National Press Photographer's Association. Also, Cleere's work has been featured in Photo District News magazine and Foto8.
Most recently, Cleere was honored with Best of Show at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art’s
ARTE 2007 juried exhibition.
In her studio, Cleere personally created a unique process of blending images through photography and painting. She assembles her creations from a vast collection of vintage doll heads, weathered animal bones, frozen birds and other electica collected on her daily travels.
Today she is a full-time artist living in a century-old cigar factory loft, surrounded by rustic props and colorful paints which she uses to blur the line between work, art and life.
