Australian photographer Catherine Nelson, whose debut solo exhibit in China titled "Future Memories" is currently on display at the Galerie Paris-Beijing in the 798 Art Zone, creates universes of pure wonder by digitally manipulating natural landscapes. Her pieces draw to mind the addictive pleasure of staring at maps, trying to picture roads less traveled and dreaming about what dragons might lie just off the dog-eared edges. Every "photo" in the collection is a composite of hundreds of separate images, stitched together to create an illusory three-dimensional globe - an entire planet in and of itself.
At Saturday's vernissage for "Future Memories," guest of honor Frances Adamson, Australian Ambassador to China, placed Nelson's work in the context of a commitment to nature and revealing it in previously-unfathomable ways.
"I view it as a poignant commentary on the global environment," Adamson said in her speech during the opening ceremony.
For her part, Nelson, a former special effects artist for big-budget films such as Moulin Rouge and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, said that her focus on the environment is something of an accident that came about from following her natural photographic instincts.
"I'm happy to get the connection with ecological issues, but that wasn't my goal," she told the Global Times during the opening ceremony.
Instead, her motivation was purely to impart a sense of the beauty of the natural world, an interest she said was inspired by her upbringing in the untamed environs of the Australian outback.
"Beauty touches people beyond their minds," she said. "I was inspired by landscape paintings and the immensity of the beauty being depicted. I truly consider myself a painter with a camera, with technology as my brush."
To that end, Nelson hardly demurs to wilderness in all its raw, unstaged power. As evinced in her images, individual visions of nature are subject to dramatic, unscrupulous transformations. She readily admits to inserting scenes of an Australian brushfire into a Belgian countryside in End of Winter Bourgoyen, for example, or directly erasing people using Photoshop from the stunning tree-lined vistas of Monet's Garden.
"Feel free to try to take a photo of a landscape inside the Garden that doesn't contain tourists - it's practically impossible," she said of the famous French botanical enclave.
She also spoke at length about the proliferation and burgeoning popularity of digital photography in the art profession as a whole.
"At the Paris Photography Festival, for example, I've noticed a veritable explosion of digital photographic art in just the last few years," she said. "It also seems to have a greater foothold here in China than in Western art circles."
Nelson characterized the appeal of digital photography as that of imagination unrestricted by the scope of a camera lens. Indeed, however her eternally-primeval microcosms appear in reality, her eyes see them in a constant, circular continuum, unbroken by the ravages of time and human development.
"I'd like to think I'm creating positive worlds," she emphasized. "Places that tell hundreds of stories within a single image, all without seeing a single person's face."
When: Until January 20, 2012
Where: Galerie Paris-Beijing, 798 Art Zone, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang district
Admission: Free
Contact: 5978-9262