Response to Print of Egret Rookery, Louisiana, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Contender Laura Plageman's landscapes are constructed creations where lush, verdant lands and surreal, white skies buckle, bend, tear and fold. The resulting dreamworld she's created is at times stark and isolated, but imbued with wonderment and resplendency. To create the work, Plageman re-photographs enlarged prints with a large-format camera, manipulating and interacting with the original. A fold in the print, when re-photographed, serves as a tool to deflect and distribute light, for instance. The crisp details accentuate and enhance the evident artist's touches.

Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas, 2010 by Laura Plageman

Taken from her Response series, the images, like Plageman, "explore the relationships between the process of image making, photographic truth and distortion and the representation of landscape." From her artist statement:

In this series I am responding to photographs both as representations and tangible objects... I create works that oscillate between image and object, photography and sculpture, landscape and still life. While they may appear illusory, the resulting pictures are documents of actual events and are thus as authentic as the original representational images contained within. My process unfolds through observation and experimentation—I let the image and its materiality dictate its direction. Playing with paper and with light in unplanned and organic ways, I look for new ways to perceive the space, form and context of my subjects.

Response to Print of Green Hill, Washington, 2010 by Laura Plageman

The images in Plageman's series touch upon nature and "the hand of man" in both a literal and figurative sense, while simultaneously making the elements within the picture—the documented, the fabricated, the manipulated—meld and interact with one another to create an entirely new landscape, an entirely new creation.