BY TEQUILA MINSKY | For over 50 years, SuZen’s working and waking lives have been shaped by a devotion to fine art photography, design, travel, peace activism, and the creation of public art.
“I’ve been a seeker all my life. I’ve been always connected to Buddhist images, loving light,” says the artist who legally changed her name to SuZen in 1981. A decade before that, she moved into Westbeth, a pioneer, one year after the former Bell Laboratory Complex at 55 Bethune St. opened its doors as an affordable housing complex where artists could both reside and create.
“Then, it was a very seedy part of town,” SuZen recalls of the Greenwich Village waterfront location, which has served as the home base from which she curated, organized and created work that has appeared in, among other public places, the lobby of One World Trade Center and the TWA terminal at JFK.
Inspired by the Buddha’s teachings, SuZen’s 50-year retrospective, “Visions of Light & Spirit,” marks her third solo show at Westbeth. In addition to the entire gallery space being filled with the progression of her work from 1966 to the present, this exhibition premieres “Transmigration,” a one-room work in which the viewer, surrounded by sounds of nature, walks through diaphanous layers of fabric, immersed among images of underwater life cast from a continuous loop from two projectors in sync. A single stingray swims up, alone, into a bird form.
“I’ve collected video footage throughout the years,” the artist notes of the sources of her imagery for the multi-media installation, whose essence is “all about the projection of light. Because you’re walking through the fabric, you’re seeing multiple images and it’s very holographic; very three dimensional,” she says, further noting how “Transmigration” is a logical progression in her art and perspective.
“Very early, I was taken by multiple realities that exist,” recalls SuZen, whose early-era works explored these concepts on an intuitive level before her attraction to Buddhism began to overtly influence the direction of her work as a fine art photographer.
Jerry Uselmann, the master of photographic layered realities, the forerunner of photomontage, is a photographer she was acquainted with as a student who greatly influenced her. Sandwiching negatives together and printing multiple images onto one photograph is a technique she used in her early work. “I was very taken by his Jungian, dreamlike images.”
Reflections, and reflections through glass, are a repeated theme in SuZen’s work. For example, in the black and white “Reflections of Venice,” SuZen loved the reflections of the original photo. “I printed four of them and mounted them together to create reflections of reflections with a dramatic perspective of the buildings,” she explains.
Throughout the years, traveling to over 40 countries offered the artist an immense cache of images to draw upon for her current retrospective. The exhibition starts with photos from her first post-student trip to Europe in 1966 and includes a 1968 4×5 view camera shot of building a sand castle at the ocean — “California Dreaming.” These represent very different photographic experiences than today’s digital world.
In the West gallery room, the intrepid artist shows a vibrant, trippy series of images from the interior of caves in Yangshou, China.
“I love the darkroom,” SuZen says, explaining that early in her photographic life she favored printing in large scale. “I would combine images, butting them together,” essentially, making one-of-a-kind images. She reminisces about the 5-foot by 6-foot piece that Standard Oil bought.
Selecting work from six of her series amidst the vast volume of her work, SuZen had to make tough choices as to what she would show.
In the cozy far end of Westbeth Gallery’s main space, SuZen is showing images from her “Blindseries” — as in Venetian blinds with light filtering through.
In the adjoining gallery, she has three life-size self-portraits printed on canvas with shadows cast from the blinds.
“Flowing Light,” a part of this series, became a stories-high mural in 1984 on a building on W. 42nd St., across from the Port Authority. “It’s amazing. If you visit my mural today, it looks just as good as it did in 1984,” she says.
Additionally, in a glass case, SuZen is showing the diminutive small screens of “Blindfolds” — 4.5 inches tall. In her “LIGHTvision” series, images from the “Sacred Journey” and “Transmigration” installations are shown throughout the gallery — some, color prints. Others, printed on aluminum, reveal a subtle luminosity.
In one particularly tranquil room, images hang from her “Selectively Toned” series and her “FOGseries,” bathed in the most peaceful pastels. In the West Gallery room, her amusing “Lost Glove” series is an installation in which the titular objects are scattered on the floor.
Curator of her own exhibition at Westbeth Gallery, the artist shares the different threads of her work from her traditional black and white days to expansive explorations of the medium. Throughout it all, be it conceptual, sculptural, ethereal or whimsical, her lifelong passion for the medium is constant.
“Visions of Light & Spirit: SuZen’s 50th Anniversary Retrospective Exhibition” is on view through May 21 at Westbeth Gallery (55 Bethune St., btw. Washington & West Sts.). Free. Hours: Wed.–Sun., 1–6pm. Artist Talk: Sun., May 8 & 15 at 3pm. Artist info at suzennyc.com and bit.ly/SuZenGPlus.
