Dark-heaving-boundless, endless, and sublime,
The image of eternity.
From: “Childe Harold”
Lord Byron

In Joan Schreder's Antartica Series (2001) the penetrating eye of the artist's camera pans towards what appears to be awe-inspiring scenes of the dawn of a mythic pre-Edenic era. In riveting scenes such as Antartica Series # 1 and 3, for example, Schreder seems intent on recording areas of the world that are unlike anything ever seen, let alone experienced, by socialized people. Much to her credit the topographic images she records have a sublime quality that is meant to move the viewer. Indeed the topography the artist examines is so remote so barren and forbidden that its jagged glacial cliffs, its totemic frozen tundras , icebergs and ice flows do nothing less than suggest to us images of the fantastic and the exotic marvelous. It is this mixture of the natural and the supernatural which gives the exotic marvelous its special tenor in the Antartica Series. The emotional intensity of the space and place localized through Schreder's icy imagery creates a feeling of palpable and irresistible, even of improbable grandeur.

An impression of inviolate unpitying starkness is at the core of this artist1s work. Yet this sensation is problematized somewhat by Schreder's sensitive handling of the nuances of light and shadow particularly as they unveil geologic details. This approach to landscape photography introduces into nature an openess, a nakedness and a vulnerability which are ecological facts. It is hard not to view Joan Schreder's Antartica Series as forensic photographs --- as elegiac mementos of a fragile and small part of the earth that is at risk of disappearing in the not very distant future.

The subject of landscape when it met by an artist such as Joan Schreder is a particularly rich one. Prophetic dreamscapes and paths of pilgrimage are suggested in this fierce, and sublimely terrifying work. Inevitably such imagery, derived through photographic processes, is a way of recording the past; freezing (if you will) moments in time. Yet this project is also a way of attempted recapitulation or revisitation through artistic means. Such deeply-felt photography is a way of territorializing the very subject matter of landscape. I use this word very carefully keeping in mind that the very word "landscape" is derived from the Dutch word "landschap" which signifies a unit of human occupation, a jurisdiction. The association of landscape and topography with memory (and even with national identity) is therefore inescapable. Indeed, landscape, in its own way, permeates our sentences. It infiltrates our language. It colonizes our thoughts. Particularly those that have to do with our notions of our own physical selves projected out onto nature. It is not by accident that we refer to the "head" and the " foot" of a mountain, the "leg" of a journey, the "trunk" of a tree, and the " arms" of its branches. One might even say that it is " natural" to use language this way in conceptualizing the world metaphorically. Joan Schreder's photographs from her 2001 Antartica Series, therefore, bring together a deep interest in unforgettable vistas along with a speculative investigation on the constituent details that comprise forbidding, isolated areas of the world. This work is driven by a fascination with an environment which sustains life and growth in the most unlikely of fantastic conditions (Antartica Series #s 12, 13, 14, 15).

As defined by Tzvetan Tederov the concept and the assessment of some experience approaching what might be termed "the fantastic" arises out of the sensation that we are being tricked by our senses. That we are experiencing something that violates the standards or norms of the everyday life world experiences, or else we are led to believe or understand and accept that a reality hitherto unknown to us has taken shape and has insinuated itself in our presence. And that this reality is governed/controlled by laws unknown to us. What captivates us, then, is this sense of Schreder's having eterritorialized the fantastic sublime through her imagery (see particularly Antartica Series #s 1, 4, and 10). The sublime, as made clear originally in Longinus' "On the Sublime" and much later in Edmund Burkel's "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful" (1757), is associated with powerful emotions of the kind that Romantic poets such as Schiller and Goethe and artists such as Fuseli and Casper-David Friedrich were enamored with. These images, literary or pictorial, held the attention of the subject through its intimations of and associations with infinity, solitude, emptiness, darkness and the inspiring forces of terror --- all considered the birthplace for the proper fomenting of the genius1s creative sui generis powers. This was countered by the qualities of the beautiful which were associated (in contrast to the sublime) with brightness, smallness and smoothness.

Sublimity was something entirely different. The sublime had something to do with the shock of being in the presence of uncontrollable forces, terrifying ones. And these forces were associated with complex feelings of awe (spiritual or religious) or with vastness and immensity where nature shows us a side that enables us to have great thoughts, loftyfeelings, where we can transcend through a not-known. Emmanuel Kant, it is well known, equated beauty with the finite and the sublime with the infinite.

Schreder's photographs, while they might be considered beautiful in the superficial sense, refer to the sublime genius of the place, the wilderness, as fragile container of primeval, even mythic, forces. Her Antartica Series is about a specific geographic region. But it is also about somewhere else. It references a landscape of the mind that is meant to remain uncolonized: the unconscious, the unchartered, the uncharterable, the uncategorizable. From this perspective it becomes apparent that images as Schreder's reflect our need to contemplate landscape imagery as a way of placing ourselves (mentally and psychically) at a remove from acculturated concepts of space and time. Photographs of undomesticated panoramas are a means of presenting the viewer with a window into liminal areas on our planet in which the marvelous (imaginatively speaking) can be given birth. The hermetic isolation (and plangent soulfulness) of such areas is stressed in Schreder's photographs to great advantage. Unpeopled images, as in Antartica Series #s 2, 3, 4 and 5, for example, work on two levels: they leave the imagination free to roam as scale becomes difficult to gauge in such pictures. They allow moments of rapture to resonate within those other moments of sublimity. Just as importantly, these images are meditations on the fate of Antartica as space and place, understood symbolically and imaginatively as well as in real terms.

Thomas Merton once wrote of the desert contemplative that "sit is a necessary break with a conventional social context into an apparently irrational void." It is quite clear that one of Schreder's artistic gifts is her compositional and framing acuity, faculties which heighten the drama and purpose of her photographic project, Antartica Series of 2001. Through these poetic images the artist makes a plea to see raw nature as a state which collapses subject and object differences, a splendid arational void. In this majestic brooding series Joan Schreder allows herself to go egoless. She lets the sublime wildness speak. It says there are no objects in Nature, no subjects in Me. Only presentness and process, development and dissolution.

Dominique Nahas is a curator and critic based in Manhattan.