Jamie Cabreza is an artist residing in Easton PA. Her primary focus is creating landscapes where our built and natural environment converge and the effects that both time and humans have on their surroundings. She currently teaches photography at Lafayette College and Tyler School of Arts at Temple University.
Artist Statement
My photographs have always been about the art of noticing – intensely observing my surroundings while envisioning both the past and future of the current state of things. Our environment reveals the mess of relations, neither utopian nor dystopian. The structures of our occidental society are in a state of decay and stagnant, and yet there is an indeterminacy in both our built and natural environment. Through my work and observations, I seek to collaborate with my community to flesh out the latent commons in our shared habitat.
My Gleanings series questions our relationship to the ubiquitous consumption of single use plastics that is so prevalent in America. By focusing on these micro landscapes, I address a larger environmental crisis, one where everyday objects contribute to the degradation of our habitat. Though hyper-realistic, the photographs imagine alternative futures and are influenced by a fascination with science fiction and outer space. In creating these imagined cosmoses, I collect and archive my community’s discarded material, forming a local index.
In a separate body of work Armature, structures are recorded are in a state of transformation, serving as hosts for new life, or cracked by time, weather, and floods. They are brimming with potential or ruin. They mirror our situation, demonstrating how humans are never actually in control.