CAROL EISENBERG (American b. 1942 - )Photographer Although they read as paintings, these lushly colored photographic images of trees, flowers and birds are digitally ‘’constructed’’ by means of various blending, erasing and transforming techniques. They are further altered by modifications to hue and saturation … and by the insertion of appropriated imagery, gestural strokes or other marks. All of the imagery has been exclusively created and arranged by the artist.The images are slyly subversive in that although they depict nature, which connotes ‘’beauty,’’ they are replete with urban components in the form of paint, plaster, dirt, words, graffiti or other elements transposed from city walls and sidewalks. The scarred surfaces speak to Carol’s lifelong struggle against feelings of helplessness in the face of injustice, her drive to rebel against conformity, her need to rescue what is damaged and her attraction to the sensuality in decay.The work is richly layered and reflects Carol’s strong affinity for beauty and passionate involvement with issues of identity and feminism. It celebrates the poetry in the everyday world and addresses the question of what is or should be considered ‘’art’’ – and therefore worthy of attention. On new Botanical Series"These vivid botanical and floral images evolved from a series I started last November when the weeds on my property began to wither. I gathered up Queen Anne’s lace and other stems … and photographed their dried blossoms, leaves, and berries. My initial compositions, which focused on the Queen Anne’s lace, were soft and dreamy. Then a visitor brought me a bouquet of flowers mixed with eucalyptus leaves. The flowers eventually decayed but the eucalyptus leaves remained intact … silvery, blue, and green depending on the light. I photographed them against the reflective bronze tiles of my kitchen backsplash. The effect was magical. I decided to combine, in a digitally constructed painting, the irresistible eucalyptus leaves and the berries, stalks and vines I had photographed last autumn. Then, because I crave color (especially in the winter), I added other flowers… some photographed and some drawn. The images became increasingly bold and graphic ... almost two dimensional in places. The final result conjures a mythic, idyllic place where the ethereal beauties of the natural and made worlds co-exist in harmony." “What I see in the images is abstract organic shapes and unexpected vantage points and perspectives. Like looking across complex relationships of visually colliding shapes and patterns, you send the viewer’s eye deep into abstract spaces. I think you accomplish your goal by composing and juxtaposing organic objects and structures, layered on top on one another in a way that compresses space and removes all context and sense of scale. The compositions become like another world where sky, land and water merge and transform to become new kaleidoscopic structures.” Lensculture Magazine portfolio review Carol Eisenberg has been a practicing photographer since the 1990s. Her work is in both public and private collections, including Bellevue and Jacobi Hospitals in New York City, where it is on permanent display. In 2013, after closing her New York law practice and moving to Maine, she returned to school for three years to obtain an MFA in Media Studies and Photography from Maine Media Workshops + College. In August/ Sept. 2020 The Maine Jewish Museum in Portland hosted a solo exhibition of Carol’s work. Her work was also featured in the August 2020 issue of Decor Maine There is mystery in Carol Eisenberg's work that goes far beyond her technical skill with the combined mediums of photography and digital painting. The images evoke feelings of serenity and chaos simultaneously; for example, the stillness of lily pads on the water's surface is rattled by what appears to be unsettling movement in the background. Enchanting forests invite the viewer in, but the seemingly audible rustling of leaves reminds us not to get too comfortable. Carol's "constructions" speak to many truths, and she dives deep to turn these expressions into layered images with her praiseworthy mastery of creating depth. There is an apparent history in her creations that continues to ask us to look deeper, and her decision to saturate or desaturate (or entirely alter color) adds yet another element of surprise to the final image. These are fascinating, unique works indicative of the enormous possibility in modern photography and digital manipulation, but doing it well takes an artist fiercely dedicated to their craft and the trial and error that goes along with exploration and exploitation of a very complicated medium. Carol accomplishes this. CAROL EISENBERG: Notes Toward a Statement of Art by Claire Raymond Carol Eisenberg’s genre-bending photography blurs the boundary between floral still-life, historically coded as feminine (and therefore lesser), and landscape (traditionally coded masculine). Commanding the terrain of landscape photography, she subversively deploys vivid color, blossoms, texture, tactility, and the equally—though we are less apt to admit it—historically feminine mark of trash. The femininity of trash is the unspoken discourse of the feminine as the abject, the cast-out, the worthless. Women are “discarded” more readily than men (think of the phrase, discarded mistress). Women are cast as the always-already at the verge of discard.Eisenberg’s photographic surfaces carry the technique of fragmentation, layering fragments of photographs in palimpsestic density, with urgency of vision. This vision reads in layers. One sees initially the complexly beautiful surfaces of softness, color, budding branches, street scene, river, water. Then one notes the marks of trash, and graffiti, the wounds of the images. The effect of layering is to suggest that what is seen—the visible—is never one layer, never one surface but as in the concept of the tell (houses built on top of the ruins of ancient, previous houses) the work shows how the surface of the visible is built of many surfaces, the present moment is built of many histories.The inclusive and (almost secretly) mournful look of Eisenberg’s emerges from its textural commitments, that is, its commitment to gathering the visible world into assemblages of found objects, forest, branches, river, flowers, mixed with urban detritus. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, assemblage emphasizes fluidity and multiple points of connectivity. In Eisenberg’s Xanadu, the pleasure-dome of Coleridge’s opium dream is reimagined as a place of searingly pleasurable loss. Here, the organic forms of the material world float up to us, they are offered to us, through the watery element of visibility, but each one is already shown as partially dissolving even as it is lifted to our eyes.That which we see is always a gift and also on the cusp of moving away from us. Eisenberg’s work though painterly of surface is quintessentially photographic not only as medium (her digitally shaped images are photographs) but also conceptually. Photography is the art of loss. Eisenberg’s medium is photography because hers is an art in dialogue with loss and survival.Eisenberg’s attraction to suggestion, intonation, implication, and softness, is art in the subversive mode of the feminine as Hélène Cixous defines it in Writing the Feminine—the feminine as pluralistic, endlessly hidden and revealed. The feminine work of art is not necessarily created by a woman, though it can be, and in Eisenberg’s case is. Her personal history with feminism goes deep, all the way to the cultural feminism of the 1970s, as she was a signal force in this epochal movement. This activist history percolates through the taut surfaces of her painterly images. Her work is like walking into a house where every detail has been curated for beauty only to find that on a given table is a book of poetry, and within that book is the essential understanding that you need, of pain and loss and resistance, to survive. There is real grit to these delicate tapestry-like visual planes. Water Lilies cohere with the River Styx, in Eisenberg’s work, because anguish and beauty are twins, as are forgetting and surfacing to remember. These are ultimately landscapes of reclamation, reclaiming the feminine, reclaiming trash, graffiti, death, and forgetting, for the purpose of photographic remembrance.Her influences may be Pollock and Twombly but these color fields, photographic assemblages, are feminist stagings, tableaux vivant of discards, of survival in this 21st century, our most panicked, disordered, contemporary world. They instate beauty in that place of decomposition, at the thrilling edge of falling, they rise.—February 1, 2021Claire Raymond, scholar, poet, and author of The Photographic Uncanny; Francesca Woodman's Dark Gaze; and Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics, among other titles. She lives on the coast of Maine. CAROL EISENBERG LIVES AND WORKS IN ROCKLAND, MAINE and JAFFA, ISRAEL EducationMFA Media Studies/Photography, Maine Media College, Rockport, ME, 2016Solo Exhibitions2020 Maine Jewish Museum, Portland, ME, Fictive Landscapes2020 Carver Hill Gallery, Camden, ME2008 Long Island Maritime Museum, West Sayville, NYGroup Exhibitions2021 PhotoPlace Gallery, The Poetry of the Ordinary2021 New York Center for Photographic Arts, Primary Colors2021 Cove Street Arts, Portland, ME, Abstract Nature2021 Washington Arts Association & Gallery, Washington, CT2020 Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA, Corona2019 LensCulture, Competition Gallery2019 Maine Media Gallery, Rockport, ME, Golden Hour2017 Maine Media Gallery, Rockport, ME2016 Thesis Exhibition, Pascal Hall, Rockport, ME2016 Maine Media College, CMCA, Rockport, ME2015 Maine Media College, CMCA, Rockport, MEInvitational Benefits2021 Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Art You Love2021 Bakery Photo Collective, Portland ME, Photo A Go-Go, To Go2020 Speedwell Projects, Portland, ME2020 Finding Our Voices, Rockland ME2020 Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Art You Love2019 Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Art You LovePublicationsPeople Looking at Art, 2019Balagan, 2011PressThe Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly, Summer Issue, 2020Antidote, Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, April, 2020Dangerous Beauty, Décor Maine, August, 2020During Dark Times, Portland Press Herald, September 14, 2020Maine Art Sales Surge During Pandemic, Portland Press Herald, October 18, 2020Maine Home and Design, July, 2015FilmsStarting Out In The Evening, 2007August Rush, 2007CollectionsBellevue Hospital, New York, NYJacobi Hospital, Bronx, NYNassau County, NY Supreme Court, Mineola, NYPrivate collections across the U.S. and Israel Recent AwardsFlowers ll 01, Special Mention2021 Annual Members Exhibition, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Juror Aline SmithsonNo Entry, Honorable MentionPrimary Colors, New York Center for Photographic Art, Juror Ann M. JastrabMorocco, Honorable MentionThe Poetry of the Ordinary, Photo Place Gallery, Juror Douglas Beasley