The Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo - 2005

"Gallerywise" - Elizabeth Cook-Romero

Shadows become glowing light and light becomes midnight dark in Nancy's Sutor's cyanotypes. The shadows of chrysanthemums become the faded, pale tones of old wallpaper, and an empty glass becomes the source of a great mystery. An apple tree and iris roots become like the patterns on old silk, much more beautiful than garish new silk. Like memories, the graceful arch of a bittersweet branch seems stonger because of tis missing details; what is lost makes what is retained more meaningful.

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THE Magazine - September 2005

Critical Reflections - Rinchen Lhamo

Much of what you can think of, including the untihinkable, can be referenced or concieved through its reverse. The pleasure of a cold shower is known through the discomfort of the heat that precedes it. Sweetness, roughly speaking (but inclusive of both the literal and metaphysical meaning), is to be gauged in respect to memory of the bitter. Likewise, absence in known through an implied or remembered presence.

That the phenomenon exists at all, that the mere exposure of an object to sunlight will yield a visual form that runs counter to (but not contradictory to) the perception of the unmediated eye, tells us something about the inherently chauvinistic perceptions that are built into human vision. That is, what we see with th naked eyeball is what we see, a necessarily limited interpretation of form, one that is governedby the psychic wiring of the human nervous system. From the point of view of a single sensitive individual, a mystic perhaps, someone highly sympathetic to other forms of life that are nurtured by the sun that inhabits our solar system, is seems reasonable to imagine that it could be at least theoretically possible to inhabit the mind-set and vision of, say, a bumblebee as it homes in on a springtime apple tree in full flower. Not likely, and certainly not possible from the point of view of a species-wide learned capability, but maybe you (singular) could be up to it. With sufficient curiosity motivating the task, anything is possible.

But lest we forget that there is that infinitude of diverse sensing apperata governing perceptions throughout all froms of sentient life. Nancy Sutor's toned cyanotypes - altered versions of what we humans call "flower," "tree," "plant" - thoughtfully instill an ellipsis of wonder, and wonder glimpsed through a recognition of primal vacancy, or animated twilight. That recognition has to be good news, for this reverse-presence, or absence, inhabits all material phenomena (to say nothing of the immaterial - a seperateand more complex and sophisticated topic) and likewise renders every visible thing incomplete, subjectto the ravages of time and circumstance. Spring, summer, winter, fall - nobody made those seasons up - yet they are made up, built into the world we all got born into. Sutor says her real subject is time. By acknowledging its passage by exposing her trees and plants to those seasonal atmospheres, these objects of light's embrace become essences that appear through the abstraction of shape.

Whatever is instantly and easily likeable - as these images are - and then continues to invite fresh scrutiny, enacts its own kind of clarity and scapes the fate of facile and momentary charm. Ideally, scrutiny may even achieve an articulate silence, in this case so symbolically correct, given the sensibility built into these images.