Erika Blumenfeld
Houston, TX
Erika Blumenfeld is visual artist and Guggenheim Fellow with a BFA from Parsons School of Design. Blumenfeld has chronicled a range of subjects including atmospheric and astronomic phenomena, bioluminescent organisms, wildfires and Antarctica. Blumenfeld has collaborated with science institutions such as the McDonald Observatory, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the South African National Antarctic Program. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad, including the Albright Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), TATE Modern (London), Fondation EDF Espace Electra (Paris) and Kunstnernes Hus (Norway). She has been awarded residencies with Cape Farewell (Scotland), SANAP/ITASC (Antarctica) and Ballroom Marfa (Texas). Blumenfeld’s work has been featured in Art In America, ARTnews and many books, including The Polaroid Book (Taschen 2005 & 2008) and Arte da Antarctica (Goethe-Institut, 2009). Her work is in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Lannan Foundation, Houston MFA, New Mexico MFA, Scottsdale MCA and UT.
Light Graph: Winter Solstice
Erika Blumenfeld
Artist BioLight Graph: Winter Solstice documented the amount of daylight present, minute by minute, on the Winter Solstice in 2000. The piece consisted of hundreds of 4″x5″ color Polaroids exposed only to pure light, which leaks across one edge of the film in a perfectly arching gradation. Beginning a few minutes before sunrise, the artist exposed one Polaroid for two seconds every minute, continuously, until just after sunset. The process records the relative amount of light present at the exact moment the exposure was made, depicting the light radiated to the Earth over the course of the day. Pinned to the wall in a grid formation, each Polaroid installation provided a unique documentation of time and light.