Artist Lecture Paper

Artist Talk: Nicole Pietrantoni’s Early Work
Throughout her studies and travels,Pietrantoni was able to develop a theme in her work: the complex relationship between humans and nature.  Even as her art continues to change and evolve with skill and experience, this theme still drives her work. The first piece she displayed, titled The Romantic in You, takes a romantic image of a landscape of nature and emphasizes its manipulation even further. She pointed out that even the earliest nature photographers manipulate their photographs through combining multiple images. In this way, from the beginning of this form of art, humans have romanticized their ideas about nature’s landscapes.  With her work, she took one of these romantic photographs herself and printed it onto plexiglass and then shined a light through it. This emphasized the manipulation of images that people have conducted throughout their artistic experience with nature.
Pietrantoni continued to work with light and projection. Her next project, The Forecast Looks Good, uses found objects rearranged on glass till their projection resembled a tree.  This portrayed not only how people can affect their projected image of nature, but also how they directly can create or destroy nature. Some of her later work even allowed the viewers to interact with the work and change the location of the shapes on the plexiglass in order to create their own landscape.
Following this work, she traveled to Iceland in order to continue her education.  With this, she was introduced to entirely new and exciting landscapes. These landscapes, as well as a lack of the same materials offered at her school in the United States, encouraged her to find new forms of creating her art. This started with a simple project that was influenced by the fact that she spent a great deal of her time outside of work and school exploring the landscapes of Iceland with all the tourist. She highlighted this nature based tourism with postcards. She would insert them in other postcards already in the tourist shops in Iceland.  She also began to realize that nature and nature based tourism is really a privilege for those who have the time and the money to experience it. In this way, nature works for the people and it is there for the people. This theme can still be found in many of her works today because it is one the main ways that humans interact with natural landscapes today.
If you look at her work now, she has begun to use geometry, through the folding of paper, as well as words in order to create a new idea of humans’ interaction with nature. Although Pietrantoni’s work has changed format and form a great deal since she used plexiglass to show how humans manipulate nature as well as their own perception of nature, her theme of nature serving humans can still be found today.
QUESTIONS:

  1. Do you view tourism in a negative or positive light? How is that shown in your work?
  2. Your later work is driven greatly by crisp, geometric shape? How does this notion play a role in nature itself?

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