Fabricating Desert

Uprise Art is pleased to present "Fabricating Desert", a solo exhibition of photography by Sinziana Velicescu. This exhibition presents work that explores the tension between the built environment and the natural landscape of the American Southwest. Velicescu’s carefully composed images create an ambiguous sense of scale; the adobe and stucco walls of Pueblo-style buildings echo the texture of the windswept desert sands that surround them. Her color-blocked compositions allow her subject matter to transcend it’s objecthood, transforming into saturated fields of pigment. Cloudless skies become wide swaths of cerulean, while sun-worn brick shifts to scumbled rose madder and desert sand turns to coarse ochre with painterly abstraction. Underscoring illusion and flatness, Velicescu’s photographs present the constructed reality of the contemporary Southwestern landscape, engaging the viewer with the ever-shifting confluence between the built environment and the natural world.

Download statement