It took five days to hang Erika Blumenfeld's first site-specific installation, Light Graph: Twilight.

by LISA LAMBERT
243-2122 ext 313

Erika Blumenfeld is a light-catcher, a light-recorder. She is not a photographer. "I normally tell people I'm a visual artist," she says. "Then they say, 'But what do you make?' When I answer, they say, 'You're a photographer.' I'm not."

Blumenfeld, whose first major solo exhibition, Moments of Light, opened March 1 at PICA, uses a modified Anthony Climax Portrait Camera to capture light. She loads Polaroid film into the camera and then intentionally leaks light onto the film at regular intervals. Streaks of blues and yellow slash across the prints, which she then thumbtacks directly onto walls in grid formations. Her camera is not equipped with a lens, and she doesn't snap any particular subject. It's a technique that the 30-year-old artist created three years ago. "I'm moving from object-based creating to experience-based creating," the illuminata explains. "While I might not have a representation of a sunset, I have a recording of a sunset."

Because the prints she has created only have slight variations, Blumenfeld labeled each one to remember their order. Then, assisted by PICA's Jörg Jakoby and a handful of volunteers, she began installing her art at PICA. Punctures and repunctures with thumbtacks (1,648 appear in this exhibition) damage the prints' corners, so volunteers spent hours reinforcing the prints' white borders with tiny pieces of linen tape.

Blumenfeld Polaroids for site-specific installations as well. The first stage of creating is almost purely method-driven. For instance, she may leak light onto prints once an hour for a fixed duration over the course of 24 hours, as she did during the summer solstice. The true artistry comes from how Blumenfeld arranges the pieces on the wall.

The first site-specific installation, Light Graph: Twilight, took five days to hang. Blumenfeld wanted to exploit the height of PICA's gallery walls and communicate a sense of dusk, when the prints were made. She tacked the photos in a long rectangular shape, with the most exposed prints at the bottom and the darkest ones at the top. Viewers should feel as if they are standing on a hill, looking at a horizon, during day's final hours.

Her other installation, Light Graph: Reflection for a Muted Sky, didn't even use the walls. After observing the light in the gallery, she decided to lay the prints on the floor under a window. The daylight captured from her Santa Fe home echoes Portland's sunshine (or lack thereof) streaming through the window. The grid she arranged speaks to the lines and squares in the brewery-blocks construction outside.

True to her job description, Blumenfeld has captured the essence of light. As the artist has pointed out, light is intangible and ethereal. But she has given us a way to contain it and keep it. We have all sat by windows on sunny afternoons, closed our eyes, and seen the insides of our eyelids glow red from light. We have all felt light changing as a cloud moves overhead. Blumenfeld is able to communicate those sensations and a hundred others using her innovative technique.