Debra Bloomfield
For Immediate Release:
June 21, 2018 / Contact: contact@faheykleingallery.com
Debra Bloomfield: Pacific Light
June 21 – August 4, 2018
Reception for the Artist: Thursday, June 21, 7 – 9pm
The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present Debra Bloomfield: Pacific Light a solo exhibition of works by San Francisco Bay Area photographer, Debra Bloomfield. Bloomfield’s latest large-scale photographic series, Seas, embodies the subtle variations of tones, the brilliant gradations of the sky, and the muted turbulence of the surface of the sea. Her photographs employ the visual language of metaphor and explores the relationship between psychological interiority and the external world. As with her earlier Wilderness series, this newest body of work addresses complex environmental issues - in particular, our rising seas.
Bloomfield, whose career spans more than thirty years grew up in Southern California, where she was influenced by her mother (an oil painter) with an affinity for the outdoors. She later studied art at the University of Colorado. Bloomfield soon learned she had a natural talent for photography and began to communicate her painterly visions accordingly.
Shot with the straightforward, exacting hand of a landscape painter, Debra Bloomfield’s oceanscapes explore the relationship between physical and emotional spaces. The photographs included in this exhibition range from a monochromatic, tranquil study in whites to emotionally charged scenes of dark blue, purple and black. In some photographs the sky appears flat and muted; in others sunlight cuts dramatically through the clouds. The ocean’s surface also varies, from cratered to smooth like velvet to ethereal and ghostly.
California native Debra Bloomfield (b. 1952) received both her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University. Her large-scale color photographs encompass awe-inspiring landscapes of the American continent and capture subtle variations of earth tones, the brilliant gradients of the sky, and the muted turbulence of the ocean’s surfaces. Debra has photographed extensively in Mexico, the American Southwest, Alaska, and California. In 1992, she was the recipient of the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography. Bloomfield's monographs include Four Corner (University of New Mexico Press, 2001) STILL: Oceanscapes by Debra Bloomfield (Chronicle Books, 2008), and Wilderness (University of New Mexico Press, 2014).
Debra Bloomfield’s work is held in many public and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London England, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bloomfield currently teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and lives in Berkeley, California.
Press Photographs Available on Request