Eileen Neff, a multidisciplinary artist with a background in literature and painting, has been creating “photo-based images and installations” since 1981. She recounts her understanding of poetry long before grasping painting. Her academic path led her from being an English major at Temple University, where she immersed herself in painting studios, to the Philadelphia College of Art (the recently closed University of the Arts). While teaching at a private secondary school, a tuition-free photography class captured her unexpectedly. “I began photographing pieces of my paintings and, before long, had convinced a couple of students to build a black and white darkroom in my apartment,” she recalls. This transition directed her focus to natural elements and interiors, subjects she still rigorously explores. Though she no longer paints, Neff states, “I still think more like a painter than a photographer; my photographs are still very driven by how a poem means.” Neff currently exhibits her work in In Some Light Reading, a group show at the Mitchell Art Museum featuring work by five artists and poetic texts by four writers addressing the life-making qualities of light. The show runs through July 7th.
Your bio refers to your media since 1981 as “photo-based images and installations.” How do painting, literature, and photos intersect in your image-making?
Early on, I had written that I understood how poetry meant before I knew what to make of painting, though the attraction was always there. As an English major at Temple University, I spent all of my spare time in the painting studios on the main campus. It wasn’t until a few years later that I thought to formalize my visual interests at the Philadelphia College of Art, which became the University of the Arts. While studying there, I was also teaching part-time at a private, alternate secondary school, and it was there that I hosted a student teacher from PCA. When a tuition-free class was offered in exchange, I chose one in photography. I didn’t expect much, having had a course in printmaking and fearing I’d experience the same impatience with another time-consuming process. But it wasn’t like that. I began photographing pieces of my paintings and before long, had convinced a couple of students to build a black and white darkroom in my
apartment. And I continued photographing images found, or my own, and the bigger world in categories I still work with today: natural elements like trees, clouds, open fields, birds, etc., and those of interiors, including chairs, corners, and light fixtures. I haven’t made another painting since, though I still think more like a painter than a photographer; my photographs are still very driven by how a poem means.
You engage with concepts of picturing the natural and constructed world throughout your work. Let’s look closely at different bodies of work and start from an earlier series, Moving/Still (2001). The text for the show at Locks Gallery indicates that you generated this group of work from train photographs – “movement and time seem to exist in different states within the same landscape.” Can you elaborate on these images, and particularly how time, perception, and memory interplay in this series?
The train works from Moving/Still were in response to images I photographed while traveling back and forth between Philadelphia and New York City, where I had sublet an apartment for a few years. During those many rides, I was seduced by the changes in the experience of the landscape instigated by the train’s movement and, ultimately, I made the decision to invert the blurry effects of the near landscape with the still appearance of what was far-off in the distance, creating images that at first appeared natural enough, but were, in fact, constructions of an impossible condition.
The paradox interested me, with the matter-of-fact presentation leading the way. Anecdote of the Tree is one example of this, with the title making an adjusted nod to Wallace Steven’s celebrated poem, Anecdote of the Jar. Time and ideas of perception were at work in these images, and my own shifting sense of presence while sitting still in the moving train created the illusion that it was the landscape that was moving. Spring Seen, the larger image in the installation pictured above, represents my desire to get over my early reluctance to present a straightforward, unaltered photograph, something I hadn’t done before; this oversized production was my emphatic release from that self-imposed restriction. Finally, I let the beauty of the image discovered be enough.
Your 2008 show at Bruce Silverstein, The Key of Dreams, highlights cross-referentiality between the parts and the importance of placement in a specific space. In other words, it seems you return here to your earlier site-specific installation, The Midway, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990). Can you tell us more about the work in this exhibition and how you see it in the context of your approach to site-specific work?
The Key of Dreams was an early exhibition (2008) I created for what was then Bruce Silverstein’s smaller of two spaces on 20th St in NYC. In response to that site/opportunity, I engaged both the gallery and the adjacent storage space, where the works above were placed on the floor – nodding to the idea of storage as they were engaging the idea of display; works in waiting. In the adjoining gallery proper, I had produced a compounded variation of these works, rearranged and framed more conventionally within a single image, with related extensions of the works near the edges on each side. (See below). The whole experience is meant to heighten the viewer’s attention with a confounding set of near repetitions, changes in presentation from image to object, and shifting parameters of where the images began and ended.
In your 2014 show at Bruce Silverstein, A Prologue, you incorporate early works from the 1990s, creating a web of references to memories and locations. The gallery essay by Nell McClister says, “There are three types of images in this hall of mirrors: a detail that Neff notices; something that she pictures (a hand-colored bush spliced into a bedroom in The Visit, 1990); and something no one sees (specimens that she spotted in the spring migration lend their name to Northern Parula and American Redstart, 2014, smeary images of woods shot from a moving train).” In this show, you also push the boundaries of the frame into some mixed-media wall reliefs. This seems to have evolved from your earlier installation work in the 1990s. How do you see the relationship between these two bodies of work— from the 1990s and the work in this show?
Looking back, it seems that I always felt a certain freedom from the boundaries of specific disciplines, a feature of my having moved from one to another quite naturally. I’ve put words on walls and have had images configured to stand free of the walls altogether. And then that space in between, the wall reliefs you’ve referenced, are something I have often returned to. In my studio now, I have a floor-to-ceiling photographic tree taped flat against the wall with a small shelf sitting half in front of it, domesticating the tree’s insistent natural presence.
For the 2014 exhibition at Bruce Silverstein, I had been asked to bring some of my history along in the exhibition, and I addressed that at first directly, rephotographing older works embedded in contemporary studio moments (an expansion on “something that she pictures,” a picture in a picture, as seen in Forest in the Studio), and I had continued embracing moments of early installation considerations as you’ve noted. And the “relief” space where conventions of illusion are announced, questioned, and toyed with – it’s a favorite space that I couldn’t resist bringing along.
You have recorded in many recent works the recurring presence of the setting sun around the time of the Summer Solstice when it appears on your studio/apartment walls at the end of the day. You say—”while my work has always been instigated by my attachment to the natural world, my own physical limitations as well as more universal considerations and concerns – everyone’s relationship to the imperiled, natural world – together these thoughts have made my desire to find Nature where and how I can increasingly poignant.” Can you elaborate on your process of making the summer solstice images and their significance for you?
For the last 20-plus years, I’ve been living and working in the same space on the 29th floor of an apartment building in Philadelphia. I have a remarkable view, looking north, out of the city and over a great expanse of sky, over Fairmount Park, including the Schuylkill River and much more. What is framed by my windows has grown to be a significant link with the natural world, as distant from it as I am. I watch the weather arrive; I see the seasons change; a camera is always positioned by the windows. And the sun’s appearance on my eastern wall, what you mentioned in your question, has been a special gift that I’ve been recording over many years. It’s only when the summer solstice sun has moved far enough north as it begins to lower in the western sky that it appears on my eastern wall, traveling about two-thirds across before it darkens. Anticipating its arrival, I place images in its path to photograph the effects of this seasonal visitor.
And I should mention that I continue living with the physical limitations from a 30+-year-old car accident, so that my earlier on-the-ground adventures are relatively limited at this time, refocusing my relationship with the natural world and creating a desire to have it anyway – anyway. The solstice-inspired work is an exemplary reminder of the fact that it’s always there, one way or another, waiting for our attention. And despite my physical limits and often being stationed in my living/working site so far from the ground, I can still feel the spark of that connection, of being part of it all, in spite of all. The more universal concerns, the environmental destruction we visit on the earth, these are impossible not to be aware of and troubled by, though I don’t work to fix the physical world, but just mark my own enduring wonder within it, thinking that might be what I can give in return, what there is to do.
You say that when you were anticipating the summer solstice of 2023, you came up with the idea of photographing a tree and growing it in the studio to its original size—” a section of the trunk, that is, disappearing its top and its roots at the ceiling and the floor of my studio, to let the sun have its way with it when it arrived.” But this plan did not materialize as you anticipated. What came out of it?
I had positioned a tree on my eastern wall in advance of the Solstice work for the summer of 2023. You might remember that summer’s very particular weather/skies and how the Canadian fires brought an added layer of far-traveling smoke that affected the light and, for me, altered the sun’s appearance on my wall.
I remember a handful of clear sun crossings, but beyond that, the tree I had positioned and the shelves I mentioned earlier remained to often consider without the heightened effects of the passing light. Among others, Shelf Life was created. I also started building some other landscape elements, constructions like the paper mountain I placed before an earlier landscape photograph in Itself and Nothing Else.
You exhibited in the 2021 inaugural exhibition for the Daniel W. Dietrich II Galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—a large exhibition of nine sections designated to frame the work of selected twenty-five Philadelphia-related artists. Your section was titled (Un)Natural Histories. You say that the featured work had multiple sources, including “an ongoing practice of photographing the windows of the Period Rooms at the PMA; a photograph that was instigated by a diorama project based on images at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia; and a tribute to Ellsworth Kelly, inspired upon learning of his birding experience as a young man in New Jersey.” How are these connected in the work?
It sounds like a stretch, doesn’t it? This exhibition included a joint invitation with Micah Danges, another artist who has a heightened sense of installation considerations. For my part, I had been well into my ongoing practice of photographing in the period rooms of the PMA. Perhaps as an extension of the connection I have with my own studio windows, I was first drawn to their curtained versions as they framed the nearby landscape. But, I soon discovered that they also framed the visible gap between the constructed windows of these constructed rooms and the actual walls and windows of the museum.
With my attention to context and my own instinct to announce the site of my work’s presentation – and loving a good backstory – I was encouraged to include one of these views that also mirrored another seen from the museum gallery room where my work was ultimately displayed. Before the layered artifice of Border Crossing, I placed a plastic hedge, what I called “my real fake hedge,” confounding the conventions of what’s interior/exterior and extending this layered image one more time. On an adjacent wall, Man in Blue Looking was the diorama-inspired mage you mentioned, one that is part of an ongoing project that began in 2018 when I documented the renovation of two of the dioramas, the Takin and the Gorilla, constructed at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in the 1930s. it’s part of a much longer story, but to answer your question, I thought that bringing this particular image along as its own conversation with the artificial presentation of the natural world was a perfect variation on a theme. Even the idea of “looking” had extra resonance as we were in the art museum, after all.
And in this museum, my most often visited gallery is the one that exhibits the work of Ellsworth Kelly, now called the Jennifer Rice and Michael Forman Gallery. About a year before Kelly’s death, I had read about his adventures as a young man birding in New Jersey, a state where I have spent most of my own birding time. The article said it was where he had his first experiences with form and color. I remembered that when I was putting this exhibition together, and chose to pay my own homage with a recent work I had produced after Kelly died, Blue Jays Looking at Blue. More looking for those who would be looking.
I’d like to learn more about the diorama project. What can you tell us about Man in Blue Looking?
As I mentioned above, this work is part of a project I’m still developing. It began with the Takin and Gorilla diorama renovations at the ANSP, with Man in Blue Looking depicting an early stage in the Takin renovation. With the removal of the diorama glass, the first time since their production in the 1930s, the toxicity of the air (due to the arsenic used in the taxidermy) was so intense that it required the restorers to be wearing hazmat suits and to work within a room built around the open diorama spaces. It was through windows in these built rooms that I photographed much of the process, which lasted about seven months. No escaping windows.
While this was not typical of my work – documenting a renovation in a natural history museum – it was surprisingly resonant with so many of my ongoing interests in image/object relationships, ideas of representation, picturing presence, and the like – that I was immediately and continually fascinated and engaged by the images waiting for me throughout the process. Man in Blue Looking represents many of the initial aesthetic responses that were aroused, though the project grew to have deepening historical connections, especially as I researched in the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences and as I expanded the project to include the early Philadelphia natural history museum of Charles Willson Peale – a likely development as I initially had imagined a fine arts institution would be included in the process, and PAFA, for many reasons, had been my targeted site; among many celebrated accomplishments, Peale was also one of the founders of PAFA.
The more I researched Peale’s earlier practice of taxidermy and diorama presentations, as well as his strong belief in the wonders and wisdom of the natural world, the more I felt the connection to the Philadelphia diorama constructions that my project began with at the ANSP. I also recognized that the dilemmas and contradictions in understanding our relationship to the other living creatures we share the planet with were another persistent theme linking Peale’s earliest efforts with those I had recently encountered in my contemporary diorama experiences. All of this has contributed to a very complex and expansive project, currently titled Past Present: Through That Which Is Seen.
What are you working on now?
Well, the Peale/diorama project is ongoing, and securing its proper support and home is another job in itself. And here we are again in the time of my great solstice visitor, and this year has me refocused on controlling the shadows that this passing light brings. This is another way of saying that I’m rethinking not just what objects/images will be put in its path but where and how they’ll be placed so that their shadows have the greatest presence. And I’ve been collecting different papers for further landscape constructions. And reengaging a couple of decades worth of sky images, now seeing them as grounds for other images to be passing by, some kind of variation of my Solstice practice, with the sky as the receiving wall.
About the artist: Having formally studied literature (B.A. Temple University) and painting (B.F.A. Philadelphia College of Art; M.F.A. Tyler School of Art), Eileen Neff has been working with photo-based images and installations since 1981. Her work is currently part of Some Light Reading at the Mitchell Art Museum, Annapolis, MD and was recently featured in the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition, “New Grit: Art & Philly Now”. Eileen has been the recipient of several awards, including: John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Memorial Fellowship; Pew Fellowship in the Arts; National Endowment for the Arts Grant; Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship; and Leeway Foundation Artist Grant. She’s been awarded residencies at Fitler Club, Philadelphia; Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY; Monte Azul Center for the Arts, Costa Rica: MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH: Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; and La Napoule Art Foundation, France. Eileen Neff was a Resident Critic in the MFA Program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2004-2024. From 1989 – 2002, Neff wrote reviews for Artforum International and continues to write independently. @eileenneffstudio