Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice

Haines Gallery proudly presents Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice, an exhibition of new and recent works created in winter landscapes across Colorado, Wisconsin, and the artist's home state of Washington. This is Riepenhoff's first solo exhibition with Haines Gallery.

 

Meghann Riepenhoff (b. 1979, lives and works in Bainbridge Island, WA) creates her camera-less cyanotypes in collaboration with the elements, placing paper coated with homemade emulsion directly within the landscape. As they make contact with photographic materials, weather and water work together to produce lush, complex surfaces that invite us to consider the power and grace of the natural world. Ice features works from Riepenhoff's latest series of the same title, which she began in 2015. Expanding on her earlier bodies of work – Littoral Drift and Ecotone – Riepenhoff creates her Ice cyanotypes in freezing waters, from the snow banks of Aspen to remote creeks in western Washington.

 

Riepenhoff's Ice works contain a surprising diversity of colors, forms, and textures, from inky indigo and glacial white in the triptych Ice #64 (18-29°F, Aspen, CO 02.10-12.20), created over three days – the time it took for the work, frozen in the landscape, to thaw - to flashes of orange in Ice #129 (28-32℉, Big Creek, WA 03.09.20). Subtle crystalline forms bloom across their surfaces, where water freezes on the paper over exposures lasting several hours or days. In some areas, this delicate feathering coalesces into solid, graphically jagged masses; in others, it softens into painterly, gestural pools. Each evokes and is dependent on the environments and specific conditions in which they were made, a portrait of a time and place that is both literal and abstract, and wholly unique. 

 

Also on view are a selection of Ecotone works, created in collaboration with precipitation such as snow, rain, fog, and even melting icicles. The series title is a geographic term that describes a transitional zone where two habitats meet – aquatic and terrestrial, grassland and woodland, natural and manmade. Here, paper is draped over branches or fences, laid on the ground, or packed in snow, recording the movement of water across both natural and built topographies. In the vertical, scroll-like Ecotone #950 (Bainbridge Island, WA 02.15-16.21, Draped on Bar 99 Fence, Snowstorms), the cloud-like imprint of softly packed snow transforms into vertical striations as it melts over time. 

 

So dependent on the elements, the beauty and unpredictability of Riepenhoff's cyanotypes evoke the natural world at its most powerful and sublime. "The work expresses how water moves through topographies," the artist explains, and "how we are disrupting the surface." A photographic record of the changing states of water and its constant motion, Ice and Ecotone invite us to meditate on the passage of time, and on our impact on the environment, as we change the earth's temperatures and topographies. 

 

This exhibition is complemented by the release of Riepenhoff's highly anticipated second monograph, which includes expertly rendered reproductions of several of the works on view. Jointly published by Radius Books, Santa Fe and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice will feature works from the same series, with text by celebrated author Rebecca Solnit.