Adrienne Defendi

Project Statements

Memoria

The series Memoria considers loss and the potential of renewal in the acts of ritual, repetition, and reiteration, both in imagery and in the creative process. From my photographic documentation of the aftermath of the CZU Lightning Complex fire (August 2020) and its changing domestic and natural landscape, I created various kinds of printmaking matrices of large digital negatives, polymer plates and natural debris. What is loss? What is forever lost? Can loss be generative? With these new matrices of brick chimney, forest, tree rings, leaves, and ash, I exposed cyanotype prints in the sun. Each unique blueprint integrates repeated imagery and experimentation, and informs the creation of subsequent prints. The variables of time, sun exposure, layering, and often recoating and re-exposing the same print speak to the topical and to the archeological. Placed together in conversation, the prints offer a unique topography of layered experience, an imagined forest, a tapestry of loss and remembrance that invites us to consider the ever-shifting relationship among the natural and the human world, and our presence and meaning within.

Dwelling in Possibility

Having been a black and white photographer for most of my artistic life, I take a new direction in this series, Dwelling in Possibility. At first, the images seemed celebrative, even humorous, contrasting sharply with the last seven years, which I dedicated to documenting my aging parents and nostalgic interiors. Color offered me a fresh, even emotive path to explore, and I photographed remote forests and deep waters with abandon. As the series developed, I realized these meditative landscapes mirrored my own internal narratives of wonder and melancholy, renewal and fragility.

Relinquish

These photographs document the home where my aged parents resided for over forty years and explore their hermetic lives within. Through my lens, I came to understand how my how my parents and I, gracefully and lovingly, were letting go of each other -- relinquishing each other to the natural cycle of life.

To relinquish them is to remember them anew.

Compass

I came to this photographic project while circling a high desert bush. Walking its circumference, I marveled at its intricate architecture of twigs, its graceful dance, its very-changing existence as the light and the landscape shifted.

With a compass in pocket, I photograph to observe the subtle changes in orientation and perspective, texture and shadow, emotion and gesture. Some directional elements pull me more than others, others disorient; some are obvious, othersbarely perceptible. Each singular image is portrait-like and when gathered togetherin these polyptychs, the images both anchor and disorient the viewer, inviting us toquestion our bearings.

A Place Called America

In this color series, I document ordinary moments that seem to capture something about a mythical place called America – a place that is both familiar and foreign, ironic and nostalgic. Whereas I might have shot this series with many other cameras, the Holga camera (with a plastic lens, the choice of two apertures and four focusing distances) allows me a playful and refreshing freedom in its very lack of technology. I love shooting with it, and often marvel at the seemingly serendipitous way composition, color, and chance come together.

Pentimento

The art term pentimento describes the underlying changes in composition and ideas in the process of painting, the faint renderings of an idea evolving, covered over with the new. I’ve always been intrigued by this painterly phenomenon, by the layering process of time and thought hidden below waiting to be revealed.

In this on-going series at water’s edge, I create imagery layered with movement and memory in a palette of subtle grey hues, aiming to capture what resonates in me as elemental and mythic. Bodies of water, dark and vast and churning, become my canvas. Distant objects emerge, oneiric and transformed.

Pentimento translates from the Italian as repentance as well as change in its most secular connotation. And it is with this possibility of transformation, at water’s edge, where I might find stillness in agitation, clarity in faint renderings, renewal in self.

In My Backyard

Spending considerable time parenting in and close to home, I photograph what unfolds around me: the often overlooked moments of domestic life–backyard play, what remains to be cleaned up and put away at the end of the day, the space around me without children in tow. I find that this series of photographs seems to capture a kind of stillness and nostalgia – even melancholy – in the inevitable passing moments of both childhood and parenthood.

Is this what I dreamed or is this how it was?
Is this what I hoped to remember or wished to forget?

Rememberance

In this series of photographs, I explore the relationship between decaying beauty and monumentality. Having spent much time in Italy, I found myself drawn to these statuary works as they seemed overlooked, forgotten, and melancholic. I imagine their importance when they were first created. I imagined what history unfolded around them. I imagined what they might have witnessed. For me, these photographs symbolize forgotten narratives that beg to be retold and remembered.

Below the Dumbarton Bridge

This series of Polaroid emulsion lifts explores the landscape below the Dumbarton bridge, which crosses the San Francisco Bay and salt beds near the shores. It is a world of merging elements: land and water, salt and sand, solitude and the busy hum of the traffic above.

Polaroid emulsion lift images are one of a kind; due to the process, each image is unique. The process of making these images begins with a slide from which a Polaroid photograph is made. Within water, the emulsion separates from the Polaroid image and then placed on 100% rag watercolor paper, which gives it an undulating, membrane-like quality.