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Regina Vater
The context for the bear in this photograph becomes the electronically generated fuzz of color and shadow, rather than a natural setting
Electronic Nature Series: Grizzly Bear, 1993. Regina Vater (Brazilian). Type-C print photograph: 30" x 40". Gift of Carrington/Gallagher, Ltd. Fine Art.
egina Vater is a versatile visual artist who has had more than thirty-eight solo exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the Americas and Europe. She uses a wide variety of media to express her ideas, including
installations, photography, video, visual poetry, environmental art, computer graphics,
performances, and artists’ books. She was one of the first Latin American visual artists to experiment with video, and her works have been shown in international video festivals and on public television broadcasts in Brazil, the United States, and Europe. A love of poetry inspires much of her work and is woven throughout her multimedia pieces.Vater enjoyed acclaim and a busy career as an artist in her native Brazil before moving to the United States in 1980 upon receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1985 she moved to Austin, Texas, where she currently resides. Her work explores the creative process as an essential part of life, fusing intuition with the intellect, nature with technology, and visual art with poetry.
About this piece she writes:
Electronic Nature (1988) is a project aimed at reflecting the way in which our increasingly urban, media-oriented culture views nature. For some today, the only contact established with natural realms is through the electronic screen. Electronic Nature (an ironic “jeux des mots”) then becomes more “real” than any other physical experience via which our senses can be fed and enriched. What that provides is a make-believe sense of fulfillment, which mixed with nostalgia, replaces any craving we could ever experience for nature in the raw. That is, perhaps, our technological reward for choosing the fruits of knowledge over the fruits of life.