Garie Waltzer

Description

Garie Waltzer’s images provide a vantage point outside the fray of everyday life from which to contemplate the unseen history of place. Waltzer’s images are included in many private, corporate, and museum collections. Waltzer travels often to make her work, as she puts it, “compelled by the sweet chaos of unknown places… recording to remember and understand.”

“The signature prospect of her photographs locates Waltzer, ad the viewer, on a virtual ‘piano nobile’, the “noble plane” identified in Renaissance architecture as the optimal spot from which to view the landscape architecture. Like a Piranesi, this low-flying bird’s eye view, so particular to Waltzer’s approach, provides a vantage point neither remote as that of an aerial photographer nor as embedded as the pedestrian. She is outside the picture, but the human-scale particulars of the sites are evident and accessible within the gestalt of the landscape. The privileged position from which we view these operatic sets, these complex landscapes–the pulses of energy, architecture, and occupation–are from neither center stage nor at the remove of the high balcony, but rather just above the fray, from the comfort of the loge.”
– Leslie Rose Close, 2009 Light Work Annual

Garie Waltzer was born in New York City and received her BFA in painting and MFA in photography from State University of New York/Buffalo. Her early experimental work with color xerography collage has been included in numerous gallery and museum shows nationally, in publications on the genre, and in private, corporate and museum collections. Waltzer’s beautifully crafted carbon pigmented inkjet images explore the convergence of time, place, and populace in their views of public gathering spaces–parks, piazzas, pools, and busy streets–as visual witness to a collective narrative of our time. A recipient of artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, she is one of seven photographers recently selected for an Ohio Arts Council Individual Fellowship in Photography. She participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2008.