The BLOG: Lifestyle

Exploring time with Fedorsky’s ‘The Light Under the Door’

In a bold, oftentimes haunting exploration of the passage of Time, Tsar Fedorsky shares a highly personal photo essay “The Light Under the Door” with visitors of the Garner Gallery at the New England School of Photography in Kenmore Square.

The collection developed by the Amherst-educated artist draws upon her understanding of the novel, In Search of Lost Time, also translated as Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. The essence of the essay prompts viewers to contemplate the significant, symbolic use of gray as a visual commentary on the realities of everyday life. Using film in a medium-square format, the photos, shot in black and white encourage contemporaries to examine parameters of the obvious past while questioning the allusiveness of future.

For Ms. Fedorsky, this work has generated uneasy internal dialogues. She says “The Light Under the Door” doesn’t answer questions about the duality of life’s course. It’s aim is to ask, “As time passed was it wise to stay safely within, living a contemplative life with the comforts of a center, conversely, would it be better to travel towards imagination’s zephyrs.” The artist says subjects were shot in natural, early morning and late afternoon light to capture and exaggerate what blurs between reality and desire.

This ethereal work stands in sharp contrast to the subjects Tsar typically shoots. Over the past 20 years, Fedorsky’s comfort zone has been photographing commercial projects. Shooting high-profile Bostonians, the subjects appear poised, relaxed, self confident; the personification of accomplishment. Saturated colors, crisp lines, clear focus define those compositions devoid of ambiguity. Some of those pieces have supported articles in Forbes, Harvard periodicals, and W magazine, where corporate portraiture is, by design, emphatic.

The subliminal message of this exhibit revisits Proustian theory. It encourages people who tend to race along the clear cut canyon of Comm. Ave. to pause and wonder, at least for a while, what it would be like to suspended clarity and question the definition of absolute accomplishment.

“The Light Under the Door” at the New England School of Photography, 537 Commonwealth Ave., Boston 617-437-1868 or [email protected]. Playing now through March 18.