Joanna Gabler, after many years of working as a painter in oils—a medium she continues to explore—and in straight photography, first attempted to combine her different visions in digital photography in 2008. Using common editing tools in her own original way, she attempts to extract the unseen energies behind physical reality. Since then she has visited various cities around the world—her native Warsaw, Odessa, Paris, Venice, and Rome, as well as New York, where she lived thirteen years—and looked at them afresh, with a mode of feeling and seeing that can only be expressed when she has broken down the data she has captured with her camera and reconstructed it in her own terms. Out of the forms she has recorded she creates new symmetries and color patterns which reveal the hidden life behind the plants, rocks, buildings, and objects she sees. As she works with the forms she has captured, new forms emerge, which may be totally unfamiliar in reference to the original thing as observed in the world. The viewer may may well recognize the shapes of branches by their twists and turns and their gnarled contours, but the trees are transformed into ideal symmetries or asymmetries. Some of this finished images may remind one of gemstone or a mandala, or even patterns on an oriental carpet.
However they appear, they have traveled a long distance from three-dimensional physical reality, through Joanna's eye, through the camera lens, through the computer to the print. They have become created objects in their own right and add a new dimension to the objects they originally came from.
In these ten views of New York, she presents her own visions, which she has developed from her experience of various familiar locations in the City.
She makes these works available in limited edition archival inkjet prints of various sizes, from 4 x 6 in. to 60 x 80 in. and range in price from $125 to $1750.