PDN Photo of the Day

Claire Rosen’s Lush Worlds

Claire Rosen’s recent book Imaginarium: The Process Behind the Pictures, published by Rocky Nook, mixes an account of her creative development and process with advice for other artists about how to realize their own vision. In celebration of the book, United Photo Industries in Brooklyn is presenting an exhibition of Rosen’s work from eight different series spanning the past decade, on view until January 27. The show includes new large-scale work from Rosen’s series “The Fantastical Feasts,” which features animals ranging from bees and starfish to camels and cheetahs gathered at long banquet tables where they enjoy species-appropriate feasts. As Rosen writes in a statement about the series, “by placing animals in a setting typically reserved for humans, it raises the question of whether we may have more in common than we admit.” Rosen’s most recent series, “Persephone’s Feast,” takes up the iconography of the memento mori, using object including skulls, candles, pocket watches, shells, animals and fruits to allude to the passage of time and the inevitability of death. Writes Rosen, the imagery “follows in the footsteps of the masters of the Baroque period, harnessing the symbolism of objects to illustrate the fleeting quality of time and the transience of life.” Also included in the show are examples from Rosen’s series that picture individual animals against lush patterned backgrounds, including exotic birds, birds of prey and insects, drawing comparisons between ornamentation in nature and in the human world. As Rosen writes in the introduction to her book, “It’s the storytelling that makes imagery compelling.”

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