Poignant Pics no. 92: On Ellen Jantzen’s "Meadow View"
“Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong.”
Meadow View
It’s likely you are familiar with the work of Ellen Jantzen, who uses montage to intervene in the landscape. Photoshop allows her to give rise to images that combine the natural with the invented, speaking to topics as varied as memory, the transcendence of nature, and the impact of the landscape in human relocation and dislocation.
This image, Meadow View, is from the series Mid + West and speaks to the latter. Combining images taken after leaving California for her Midwest birthplace to care for her aging parents with those made after resettling in New Mexico, she invents a world that exists only in her imagination. I’m personally drawn to the painterly feel she has given this image, quite different than many where her images more formally display the striations and collaged nature of their making. The resulting imaginary ‘scape speaks to the subtle cultural differences she noted in the areas she had lived, despite all being part of the same country. That becomes a jumping-off point from which she muses about the experiences of those whose migration traverses cultural differences as vast as the distances they had traveled to establish their new lives, and the profound adjustments they must make to acclimate and adjust.
Bravo, Ellen. I look forward to seeing what you invent next.
Artist Bio
Ellen Jantzen is a photographic artist specializing in montage whose work has been recognized by numerous awards competitions, including the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, the Pollux Award, and the International Photography Award. Among the publications featuring her work are Artdocs magazine, F-Stop Magazine, Lenscratch, and the Harvard Business Review. Recently, Jantzen was honored to be invited as a speaker for the School of Visual Arts I3 Lecture Series. She holds an advanced degree in design from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and resides in Santa Fe, NM.
Author Bio
Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC and a BA from the University of Hawai’i.