Sherri Mabe

Artist Statement

Artist Statement — Sherri Mabe

Transforming ordinary, and often overlooked landscapes into ethereal images is the artistic
vision behind this work. Infrared is a light spectrum invisible to the human eye, yet capable of
revealing what ordinary vision cannot hold. This otherworldly light provides the ideal qualities to
express a dreamlike portrayal of the land itself.

Growing up along Colorado's Front Range, and spending much of my childhood on the vast wide
open plains, has influenced this art tremendously, to include the rendering of negative space as
an illustration of quietude. These images strive to illuminate the austere ruggedness of western
scenes, the silence of the prairie, and the soul-stirring mystery of the desert.
The connection to these homelands is ancestral as much as artistic. The Great Plains, the San
Luis Valley, the Taos Plateau, these are not locations to visit. They are places to return to.
Infrared photography has always felt less like a technique and more like a way of translating
what the land already knows into something others can feel.

These images move between the dreamlike and the elemental, between personal transformation
and collective memory. After over thirty years of practice, what goes into each photograph is the
same as what comes out, a reverence for the land, and a commitment to rendering its invisible
life visible.