In 2017, artist London Amara made a discovery; deciding to experiment with large-format collodion wet plate photography—an antique medium that was nonetheless new to her—she identified the perfect fusion of her long-held aesthetic and conceptual preoccupations. Through a photographic process that is at once convoluted and immediate—she develops her pictures on site using an ice-fishing tent as a mobile darkroom—Amara began to explore the people and places in which she was interested with a newfound directness, also extending the most important formal qualities of her previous work in abstract painting, drawing, and sculpture.
The results of this transformative period in Amara’s career, seen here, are magnetic. In
the large, lush silver gelatin and pigment prints in this exhibition, Amara reveals her passion for the intuitive, wordless language of nature. In intimate portraits of family and friends, interspersed with studies of the dense, wooded landscapes of Ohio, Florida,
California, and British Columbia, she presents a strikingly beautiful vision of melancholic
romanticism that also reminds us of the planet’s fragility—and of our critical role in its
preservation. Inspired in part by the work of contemporary photographers Sally Mann and, to a lesser extent, Justine Kurland, Amara imparts both her landscapes and portrait shots with a highly personal aura of nostalgic longing—she was raised in the remote forests of rural Ohio and enjoyed a wild, outdoor childhood. All her subjects, whether animal or
vegetable, are offered as representatives of an ancient wisdom, possessors of a unique
sensitivity to the cycle of life, death, and decay that metropolitan living tends to
suppress, but which will only gain in significance as the human race struggles with
existential threats. Having shifted gradually from the biomorphic and gestural abstraction—and, occasionally, the handwritten text—that characterized her previous work toward the
explicitly representational focus on landscape and the human form that is on display in this remarkable exhibition, Amara’s work has accrued an immediately perceptible confidence and profundity. Informed by experiences in her own life—a car crash in 2009, for example, strengthened her interest in the complexities of the human body, not only as a biological entity, but also as the locus of experiences and relationships—her imagery is now fully aligned with what she terms her “first language”—the wordless speech of the natural world.
Artist London Amara was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977. An alumnus of Columbus
College of Art and Design, she has exhibited at the Columbus Conservatory (1998),
Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, Fort Myers, Florida (2009, 2013 and 2018), and
Tampa Museum of Art (2016). She has also undertaken commissions for clients
including the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team, and was the recipient of the 2013
Vincent LeCavalier Commemorative Commission. Amara’s work is represented in the
collections of Allstate Insurance, Diamond District, Fine Mark Bank, Florida Gulf Coast
University, Innisbrook and has been discussed in Art SWFL, Arts Tampa Bay, duPont
REGISTRY, Florida Weekly, Grandeur, Gulf Coast Times, Fort Myers Magazine, Fort
Myers News-Press, and Spotlight. It is also the subject of a 2012 film from Rising Sky
Studios (now Digital Caviar). Amara is currently at work on a book scheduled for
publication in 2020.
Amara maintains studios in Columbus, Ohio, and Bonita Springs, Florida,