Meike Bertrand-Paniza
Meike Bertrand Paniza is an award-winning photographer based in the United States whose works have been exhibited nationally, as well as in Japan and Italy. Her distinctive works explore both her immediate environment and her inner world of memories. Creating in series, Paniza’s images mimic the sensory and visual cues that inform her recollection. In addition, they also express the instability that she feels in the environment, simultaneously evoking enchantment, alienation and isolation.
Artist’s Statement
Between Land and Sky, (2014-2018)
In Between Land and Sky, I chose from the beginning to be attuned to the often overlooked and ordinary events of every-day life that attract my attention – fleeting time and the changes in light and mood from one second to the next. The work was inspired by a wish to create a series of images that mimics the sensory and visual cues that inform my recollection of that which is both highly personal but also true to experience. The physicality of that experience is condensed, or rather transmuted, into a sprinkling of space, color, visual, and even auditory phenomena.
Although these images were shot in Alaska, near my (former) home and with my family, they deliberately avoid being grounded to a specific location. The captured, fleeting moments are grounded in the photographic real, however, because these scenes are isolated from a larger continuum, the meaning of the images remains open-ended. The fragmentary views are both elusive and weightless, offering no more than a poetic pause or glimpse of temporal and physical space.