The aesthetics of Fire and Ice: Disparate opposites and / or parallel transformative transparencies.

 An exhibition by Christine Alfery

“Fire and Ice” is an exhibition that challenges aesthetic ways of seeing. The conceptions of aesthetics; for the most part these conceptions have been visualized as disparate forms to reality, as outside of the real, as unknown, mysterious, illusionary, dreamlike, created and surreal simulations of the real. These photographs of fire and ice problematize these disparate opposites: reality and illusion. I take the position with these photographs that aesthetics is the act of creating, making, imagining, producing art forms. Aesthetics confronts both the beautiful and the ugly. Aesthetics, I believe, occurs in the process of transformation of a form. This process of transformation – that is the aesthetic of a form – is the relationship of  undetermined abstract, unfamiliar forms, images and texts to something that is determined, real and familiar. In these photos the flame of the fire is the aesthetic; it is the space between me and the burning logs. The ice becomes the aesthetic when I transform its properties to be something other than it actually is. The aesthetic is the process of transformation.  

This exhibition is a visual historic text that focuses on two revisionists histories of the aesthetic. First there is a notion of aesthetics that essentializes the materiality that is the reality of form and appearance. The aesthetics of material things once they could be realized were authentic, genuine, not artificial and not illusory. It is the search of this essentialized truth that produced the dynamic aesthetic of real things and one could only find this truth through a revisualization of the real. Once the truth was found, however, it stabilized, became frozen − ice was always ice, and fire was always fire. The aesthetic could no longer move and disappear, become invisible, like the flame in a fire, but rather became stagnated through its synthesis of the realities of a thesis and antithesis – truth became as frozen as a chunk of ice. However, the photographs in “Fire and Ice” − cannot not merely repeat or imitate the absolute aesthetic ‘realities’ of fire and ice, the aesthetics of these photographs cannot be frozen in time.