Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer

(b. 1978, former Yugoslavia. Lives and works in Oakland, CA)



Elemental Forms: Landscapes Rearticulated

Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer’s project uses wide-open observation in service of repairing a fractured relationship between man and nature. The artist begins with daily observational walks in a redwood forest overlooking San Francisco Bay. There, she connects with the landscape and distills her observations into sketches. The drawings, in turn, are transformed into wet plate collodion photograms. In her darkroom, Nikolova-Kratzer’s uses her paper cutouts and varied maneuvers to expose sensitized collodion film. “By arranging the sinuous, organic lines into new compositions, I invite the viewer to form new associations and to envision and claim different possibilities.” The artist does not exclude anthropogenic elements such as wildfires, pollution, cargo ships. “I sense that there is a deeper wisdom in not rejecting, but rather in striving to take in the view with equanimity, in resisting the urge to deny the parts I find sad and distressing; that somehow this may be the path to imagining something that is more true: more sustainable, more beautiful, more kind.”