Wilda Gerideau-Squires

Wilda Gerideau-Squires’ extreme close-up abstract photography pares the medium down to its most elegant, elemental expression: light on surfaces. By manipulating those surfaces – folds of rich fabric, layers of sheer textiles, hard-edged glass forms – she creates endlessly inventive and unpredictable images sporting bright colors and exquisite textures. Some resemble vast, magical landscapes with golden sunlight spilling over a mountainous area. Others recall anatomy studies: soft, pleated textures evoke bent and coiled bodies. Gerideau-Squires favors ambiguity, though, so each image remains rooted in abstraction by formal qualities of depth, light, texture and focus.

As the play of lines and shapes gives way to a hierarchy of luminosity and color, her photographs take on a dazzling array of hues and intensities. In places one tone (whether strong or soft) dominates, elsewhere, Gerideau-Squires unleashes a kaleidoscope of hues, either running fluidly into a rainbow or speckled throughout the composition. From soft minimalism to brash symphonies of light, she makes the medium of photography a bewitching subject.