Artist Statement

Night Light is about the constructed environment. The images in this series are drawn from the landscape of industrial enclaves, highways and commercial strips unified by night and artificial light.They represent a mysterious and distorted world of exaggerated and unnatural color, reflected light, and fragments of illuminated signage. This landscape of factories and shopping strips is uninhabited, except for the blazing neon which accentuates its desolation and underlines a troubling separation from nature and the threat to environment, identity and community. Night Light constructs an animated environment of fragments, evoking the dynamism of an urban and industrial landscape lacking human presence. This fragmentation, and the process of layering and compositing, is the means of “remanufacturing” the built environment. The complete and intrinsic mutability of the digital fragment, ephemeral and ambiguous, moves beyond montage into the disintegration and reconfiguration of the image.

• Annette Weintraub is a visual artist working with digital image processing whose work examines the architectural environment. Her work will be seen this fall in “Metamorphoses: Photography in the Electronic Age”, curated by Aperture Magazine at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work is represented in many public collections. She received grants from the New York Foundation for Art (1991), The CUNY Research Foundation (1990,1993), and resident grants at Yaddo (1979, 1989). Annette Weintraub is Professor of Art at The City College of New York, where she directs the Robinson Center for Graphic Arts and Communication Design.