Colorado-based photographer Angela Faris Belt was uploading pictures to her computer when something dreadful occurred: it crashed. Once the shock settled, with a glass of wine in hand, she ran a recovery program to see what she could salvage. As it turned out, not much. Landscape images were overlaid with static and once crisp images gave way to data mashups. Yet, what she saw began to appear less vexing and, well, quite beautiful. Belt assembled the images into a collection named Entropy and is among two other artists featured in a current exhibit entitled Of Line and Color at The Dairy Center for the Arts, which runs through June 12.
Belt, a photography area coordinator at Arapahoe Community College, describes herself on her portfolio website as a fine art photographer whose work researches two primary themes: natural phenomena and human interaction with the “more than human world.”
After that computer crash, she ambled through the altered images until she saw what they had to offer.
“Initially, I was attached to the idea of getting back the files I had lost, so all I saw was tragedy for a while,” Belt said in an interview by email.
Her favorite is from “Entropy 5141 (Stick-Rescue).” The compiled image shows Belt playing with her nowdeceased dog Dharma, and it includes an image of flowers sent by her mother and a dining room window view of a lush field of grass where horses used to pasture. The blending of these distinct memories is poignant for Belt. They were not taken on the same “roll,” so to speak, but rather were taken years apart, in vastly different settings.
Visitors to The Dairy can expect to see a handful of Belt’s images in the McMahon Gallery. Curator Mary Horrocks gravitated toward pieces that were more abstract, saying, “I wanted her pieces to come across with the digital lines being a predominant theme. … I didn’t want a clearly defined landscape.”
This gestalt is apparent in all of the work, most notably in a piece called “Blue Ridge Mountains- Stitch” a seemingly self-explanatory title, save for the perfect intersect of mistaken line and landscape. It seems so purposeful that it’s hard to imagine the picture any other way. In another, entitled, “Flocking,” birds seem to fly both away from and toward a blurred outer landscape, creating an urgency that would not have been present in the unaltered image.
“We get a lot of people in here doing a double take,” Horrocks says. “They glance at the pictures, not quite understanding what it is they are seeing, and then they have to go read the artist statement to parse meaning and gain further clarification.”
Belt arrived at the show’s name, Entropy, because, she says, “It is the most visible fundamental law of nature. Everything moves from order to disorder (or chaos), and in my work I’m always trying to create order from that chaos.”
Processes of nature are irreversible and remind us that life is temporary, she says. She wants viewers to see beyond the initial beauty of the images and take them in on a much deeper level.
“I want people to look at them and question what they are and realize I didn’t alter them [deliberately] and that photography is a kind of language that’s written visually,” she says.
It is exactly this transmitted language that makes these images so stunning. The digital interruption of these pieces makes them appealing to a younger audience, a demographic that otherwise might just gloss over them as landscape photography. Good imagery is increasingly attainable with clever cameras and fancy photo software, but Entropy tells us something different. Belt adeptly takes pictures, but by foregoing her canon of standard imagery she transports the viewer with an unfamiliar visual experience, one that is curious, nuanced and unique.
Her crash course in backing up files is one she continually shares with her students, telling them: “Always back up your back-up with another back-up that you keep off-site.
“The redundancy of the phrase makes them laugh, but they get the point,” she says. And now, she adds, she shoots with a camera that takes a backup card to save her images from start to finish.
